A woman whose role in Donald Trump’s catch-and-kill effort to suppress embarrassing allegations about his supposed extramarital affairs vaulted her into the national spotlight has just broken her silence after the former president’s indictment.
Mr Trump was indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on Tuesday. The counts were related to the election-year scheme which involved his lawyer and other allies buying the silence, through various means, of women who came forward with claims of extramarital trysts with then-candidate Donald Trump. Former Playboy model Karen McDougal was one of several women identitfied as a target of that scheme.
On Wednesday, Ms McDougal posted a series of photos of herself on vacation (without a location tag) and coyly alluded to the indictment media frenzy in the caption.
“I’ve been out and about enjoying Gods country... I hope I didn’t miss anything,” she wrote, adding a smiling emoji.
It was a subtle but timely dig at the former president, who found himself in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday facing down news cameras as the first president in American history to face criminal charges.
Mr Trump has loudly denounced another woman involved in the catch-and-kill effort, porn actress Stormy Daniels, as a liar on his various forms of social media since Ms Daniels first went public with her allegations in 2018. He has even stooped to demeaning her physical appearance — a tactic that sharply contrasts with the utter silence with which he has reponded to the similar story that Ms McDougal has come forward to share.
The former president pleaded not guilty to the charges in court on Tuesday and has long denounced the various legal investigations circling around him as politically-motivated.
In a rambling address Tuesday evening after the indictment, Mr Trump reiterated those beliefs while clearly revealing that he expects another indictment to be the result of the grand jury investigation in Georgia probing his efforts to alter the state’s 2020 election results.
