Woman 1

"...she seemed to have been briefly cleaved from the princess telephone on which one French-manicured hand has been resting since 2006."

The following quote comes from a masterpiece of Trump commentary. Granted, that’s a terrible field and a backhanded complement, but it is by the great Caitlin Flanagan and therefore excellent: “The First Porn President” from May, 2018.

She calls JFK the Playboy president, Clinton the frat-boy president, and Trump, obv., the titular porn president. The women who appeared in Playboy, Flanagan writes, were “clean, healthy girls who were high-school cheerleaders and education majors and whose prettiness was as central as their sexiness.”

Flanagan finds Karen McDougal, now known as Woman 1 in the Statement of Facts that accompanied the recent indictment against Trump, a near Platonic ideal of this standard.

It is from this world of middle-class, young female respectability—as it was calibrated, circa 1966—that Karen McDougal emerged. In late March, McDougal appeared in a long, broken-hearted CNN interview with Anderson Cooper, in which she seemed to have been briefly cleaved from the princess telephone on which one French-manicured hand has been resting since 2006, willing it to ring, hoping to hear one more time from the man who stole her heart and took her to bed, but refused to commit himself to her.

If Karen McDougal had not existed, Playboy would have had to invent her. She so encapsulates the magazine’s ideal that she could have been created from Hugh Hefner’s rib and a handful of fairy dust. In only one respect does her biography differ from that of the dream girl: She is the child of divorce. But what can a publisher do when it is forced to merchandise the biographies of actual women and when the basic facts of their lives are so stubbornly uniform? McDougal makes up for this imperfection by having not one, not two, but three protective older brothers, their names a tom-tom of protective “all-American” maleness: Bob, Dave, and Jeff. Raised in Michigan, she was a high-school cheerleader, member of the color guard, and volleyball player, who was known, in the corridors and locker rooms of River Valley High, as “Barbie” and who was surely bound for respectability as it was measured in 1980s Michigan. Off she went to Big Rapids, to study elementary education, emerging two years later as a teacher of pre-K (Kindergarten itself being too much of a fallen world for this radiantly innocent but rapidly ripening creature), and then, it begins: the chance encounter with a swimsuit competition, an exciting win, and the career as glamour, promotional and swimwear model.