Karen McDougal told Anderson Cooper that Donald Trump paid her the greatest compliment he knows: That she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka. The revelation came when the former Playboy model was discussing her alleged affair with the then-Apprentice host that she said began at the same 2006 celebrity golf tournament where he allegedly started another affair with porn star Stormy Daniels.
During the interview, which aired Thursday night, Cooper asked McDougal if Trump ever compared her to any of his children.
“He’s very proud of Ivanka, as he should be. She’s a brilliant woman. She’s beautiful. That’s his daughter,” McDougal said. “He said I was beautiful like her and ‘you’re a smart girl’ and there wasn’t a lot of comparing, but there was some. I heard a lot about her.”
McDougal seemed to defend Trump a bit when Cooper asked her if the president bringing up his daughter while in an intimate extra-marital situation struck her “as odd in any way.”
“You know, I know a lot of people think it’s odd,” McDougal said. “There have been some comments he’s said about her in the news and I think those comments are wrong. Do I think it’s strange that a father would love his daughter so much that he brags about her? No. I brag about my dog that much.”
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The “comments” in “the news” that McDougal is likely referring to entail the multiple times over the years that Trump has sexualized his daughter while boasting about her.
McDougal is the second woman from that infamous golf tournament to claim that Trump compared her to Ivanka. In 2011, Daniels told InTouch Magazine that Trump told her “that I was someone to be reckoned with, beautiful, smart, just like his daughter.”
In speaking to Cooper, McDougal broke an NDA related to a supposed “catch and kill” deal she signed with the National Enquirer when selling her story about the alleged affair. She is currently suing the parent company American Media, Inc to have the agreement withdrawn.
