Another day, another story about Trump’s infidelities.

2006 was a busy year for the Donald. Melania gave birth to Barron in March, and everyone knows how taxing it is to be a new dad, but that didn’t seem to slow him down.

First up there is Stormy Daniels, with her account of an affair with Trump back in 2006, and now we have Karen McDougal.

Her story has been told by Ronan Farrow, who wrote perhaps the most famous Harvey Weinstein articles late last year, over on The New Yorker.

Here’s how that one starts:

In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party for the show’s contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal, a slim brunette who had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier.

In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations.

McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you – I think you could be his next wife.’ ”

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized [sic] in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own.

The interactions that McDougal outlines in the document share striking similarities with the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump, or who have accused him of propositioning them for sex or sexually harassing them. McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.

If you’re wondering why this is only coming to light now, that’s probably because the man who bought the rights to McDougal’s story, C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I. [American Media, Inc], David Pecker, describes Trump as a close personal friend.

I would suggest you make a little time to read the full story here, because it really is full of insight into how Trump managed to keep these affairs under wraps for so long.

You can bet Melania is giving him some serious side-eye this week.

[source:newyorker]