Karen McDougal, the two-time Playboy centerfold model who says that she had a months-long sexual affair with Donald Trump in 2006 and 2007, filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News on Thursday. The suit claims that Fox News on-air personality Tucker Carlson knowingly made false statements about her on a December 10, 2018, broadcast.
On that edition of his program, Carlson asserted that McDougal “approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and his family if he didn’t give [her] money.”
According to the lawsuit, Carlson described his claims against McDougal as “undisputed facts.” He also said that McDougal’s alleged action “sounds like a classic case of extortion.”
McDougal was one of two women—the other being AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels—who in 2018 sued Trump to be freed from “hush money” deals that prevented them from discussing sexual encounters with Trump. McDougal settled her lawsuit in April of 2018, just one month after filing it.
Carlson is not named as defendant in McDougal’s new defamation suit against Fox, which instead says that the network itself is responsible for allowing Carlson’s remarks about her to be broadcast.
McDougal’s lawyer, Eric R. Bernstein, told The New York Times that the former Playboy model was “harassed, embarrassed and ridiculed” after Carlson accused her of extortion on the air.
“Media outlets like Fox News must learn that they can’t mislead for ratings,” Bernstein told The Times. “They hurt real people like Karen McDougal when they do so.”
But one expert in defamation law, University of Missouri Law School Dean Lyrissa Lidsky, told The Times that the case will come down to whether a court believes that Carlson was literally accusing McDougal of a crime, or if he was using the term “extortion” as “hyperbole.”
Because McDougal will likely be considered a public figure, she will also need to prove that Carlson made the statements with “actual malice,” according to the law professor. That is, she must prove that the Fox host knew that his statements were false, or that he made no effort to check their veracity before he made them.
In the lawsuit, McDougal and Bernstein say that the charge of extortion was never previously made against McDougal, not even by Trump himself. The suit says that Carlson never attempted “even a cursory investigation” into whether McDougal had actually attempted “extortion” against Trump.
Photo By Toglenn / Wikimedia Commons
