In a public-spirited exercise in gossip archeology, D-list celebrity interviewer and former Howard Stern Show regular Chaunce Hayden, the publisher of Metropolis Nights magazine, has rediscovered a 12-year-old recording of his phone call with Donald Trump concerning a Playboy and Penthouse model Trump claimed never to have dated.
While Hayden has previously marketed his chat with The Donald to various and sundry websites over the years (Radar Online and Gawker included), it is well worth taking out of mothballs now that the reality show billionaire is the presumptive Republican nominee with a shot at being elected president of the United States.
The model in question is Victoria Zdrok, 43, a Ukranian-born former Playboy Playmate and Penthouse Pet who, in a 2004 interview with Hayden, published in his now-defunct magazine Stepping Out, was less than charitable about her close encounter with the man who will likely face former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election.
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In the interview, Zdrok claimed Trump had called Playboy to get a date with her, and they “ended up going out four times.” She said she had gotten a call from Playboy Promotions saying Trump was “looking for a new girl for his ad campaign for one of his casinos in Atlantic City… It turns out he was never actually looking for a model. He was just trying to pick me up.
“First of all, he’s really arrogant,” Zdrok told Hayden. “He’s really into himself! On a date all he does is talk about himself. He loves himself! The first thing he says to me on our date is that he’s taller and better looking than what he looks like in pictures, and that people don’t realize it. He said, ‘People don’t realize how handsome I am!’ He actually loves himself! I never met a more narcissistic person than Donald.
“You feel just like a piece of jewelry when you’re with him. For him it’s all about looks, appearances, and signing autographs. He just loves it.” (Zdrok didn’t respond to an email from The Daily Beast; neither did Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks.)
While all the above might have a certain ring of familiarity to anyone who has followed the future GOP standard-bearer’s Twitter feed, campaign rallies, and debate performances, Trump was at pains to deny, in his phone call with Hayden, that he had even met the woman, let alone dated her.
He begged Hayden not to go with the story, but, alas, the real estate and casino mogul—who was starring in NBC’s The Apprentice, then in its first season—was less than persuasive.
“Donald Trump wasn’t paying my bills,” Hayden told The Daily Beast.
Zdrok also told Hayden that all Trump did on their dates was “talk about his ex-girlfriends. He couldn’t stop talking about Ivana [his first wife] and Marla [Maples, his second wife] and how skinny and horrible Marla looks now and that she looks like shit since she cut her hair off.
“He just loves to talk about which women are in love with him and always calling him. He loves to talk about how women are chasing him all the time, which doesn’t make a girl feel special on a date. The other thing he talks about is what a great lover he is. He said to me, ‘Once you made love to me, you’ll never be able to make love to anybody else.’”
Zdrok, who told Hayden she had not slept with Trump (she did not want to be “another notch on his belt”), accused him of being racist.
“He would always talk about this one girl, a supermodel, and how he would give her the best orgasms of her life. And how she misses him so much. He told me he really likes this girl but he would never go out with her because he found out she was half-black and that would be bad for his reputation. I thought that was very racist.
“He didn’t like that she was some weird ethnic mix so he wouldn’t go out with her publicly, but that he really missed her and she was wonderful in bed. He needed somebody more mainstream.”
(Many pieces have surmised that the supermodel in question was Kara Young, whom Trump dated in 2001.)
Judging by Trump’s liberal use of curse words and otherwise coarse misogynistic language in his pleadings with Hayden not to publish the interview with Zdrok, he was also—at least by the naïve standards of a simpler time—less than presidential.
“I don’t even know who the hell she is,” Trump insisted to Hayden, after boasting about the ratings of his reality television show. “It’s the biggest thing [NBC has] had since Friends.”
In an assertion that, more than a decade later, is unlikely to help his candidacy with Republican women in the suburbs but will probably have a negligible impact on his ardent supporters, Trump said he could not have possibly gone out with Zdrok because “she looks like a fucking third-rate hooker. Gimme a break. I never took her out. She’s full of shit. Chaunce, look, I have good taste in women. Take a look at her picture. It’s all bullshit. I never took her out.”
It was “bullshit, total bullshit” that he was considering Zdrok for an advertising campaign, Trump added. “I use models, not Playboy people for that.”
Trump claimed in the call that Zdrok would call his office “10 different times, like five years ago,” asking that he take her out. “I never took her out, and based on that picture I would never take her out. She’s not even attractive, she’s not a good-looking girl… Who the hell wants a Penthouse Pet? Penthouse is gone, it’s bankrupt, it’s over.”
Being a 35-year-old Penthouse Pet was “pretty pathetic,” according to Trump.
Ever since The Apprentice had become successful, women claiming to be his ex-girlfriends had started materializing, he said.
“Two of them I did date, they said nice things about me,” Trump said, restating again that Zdrok’s claim was “total bullshit.” While it would be easier not to make a big deal out of it, Trump said, claims like Zdrok’s were “just so fucking false I don’t like them to get away with this crap.”
As for Zdrok, she also claimed to have been up close and personal with Trump’s famous shape- and color-shifting thatch of hair.
“His orange hair was very odd,” she said. “He uses so much hair spray. I would never dream of touching it. But he doesn’t care. He really thinks he’s one of the most handsome people on earth. He really does.
“After four dates I stopped going out with him. I just said, ‘I’ll call you back’ and never did. So he moved on. I just couldn’t take hearing about him talk about himself. He’s so condescending. There’s no romance. It’s all about him.”
