Jennifer Ann "Jenny" McCarthy (born November 1, 1972)[1][2] is an American model, television host, comedic actress, author, and anti-vaccine activist. She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year. McCarthy then parlayed her Playboy fame into a television and film acting career. She was formerly a co-host on the ABC talk show The View.
McCarthy has written books about parenting, and has become an activist promoting research into environmental causes and alternative medical treatments for autism. She has claimed that vaccines cause autism[3] and that chelation therapy helped cure her son of autism.[4][5] Both claims are unsupported by medical consensus, and her son's autism diagnosis has been questioned.[5][6] McCarthy has been described as "the nations most prominent purveyor of anti-vaxxer ideology",[7] but she has denied the charge.[7]
McCarthy was born in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to a working-class Catholic family, and has Irish, German, and Polish ancestry.[8] She lived in the West Elsdon neighborhood of Chicago.[9][10] She is the second of four daughters; her sisters are named Lynette, Joanne and Amy. Melissa McCarthy is her cousin.[11][12] McCarthy's mother, Linda, was a housewife and courtroom custodian, and her father, Dan McCarthy, was a steel mill foreman.[13][14]
As a teenager, McCarthy attended Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School (whose school sweater she donned in the pages of Playboy) and was a cheerleader at both Brother Rice High School and St. Laurence High School,[15] although she has referred to herself as an "outcast" at her school[16] and has described how she was repeatedly bullied by classmates.[17]
In 1993, Playboy magazine offered McCarthy $20,000 ($32,651 in 2014 currency) to pose for its October issue. McCarthy became the Playmate of the Month for October 1993. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner cites McCarthy's "wholesome Catholic girl" persona as the unique quality for which she was selected out of 10,000 applicants.[18][19] Her layout emphasized her Catholic upbringing with a schoolgirl theme. According to McCarthy, the pictorial caused an uproar in her Catholic neighborhood, and resulted in her house being pelted with eggs, her sisters being taunted at school, and McCarthy, who counted Catholic nuns among her aunts, being lectured about her future damnation by those close to her.[18] McCarthy was later made the Playmate of the Year, and was paid a $100,000 salary.[18][19] In 1994, because of her newfound public attention, McCarthy moved to Los Angeles and, for a time, hosted Hot Rocks, a Playboy TV show featuring uncensored music videos.
In 1995, when MTV chose McCarthy to cohost a new dating show called Singled Out, she left Hot Rocks. Her job as a host was a success, and Playboy wanted her to do more modeling. That same year, she also appeared at World Wrestling Federation (WWF) pay-per-view event WrestleMania XI as a guest valet for villain Shawn Michaels, who faced heroic WWF Champion, Diesel. She left after the match with the victor, Diesel. McCarthy returned to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, formerly the WWF) on the August 2, 2008 edition of Saturday Night's Main Event to thank the fans for supporting Generation Rescue, an autism advocacy organization. In 1996, she landed a small part in the comedy The Stupids. In 1997, McCarthy launched two shows. The first one was an MTV sketch comedy show The Jenny McCarthy Show, which was sufficiently popular for NBC to sign her for an eponymous sitcom later that year, Jenny. Also in 1997, she appeared on one of two covers for the September issue of Playboy (the other cover featured Pamela Anderson). McCarthy also released an autobiography: Jen-X: Jenny McCarthy's Open Book.[20]
In 1998, McCarthy's first major movie role was alongside Trey Parker and Matt Stone in the comedy BASEketball. The following year, she starred in Diamonds, a movie which was directed by her then-husband John Mallory Asher. In 2000, she had a role in the horror movie Scream 3, and three years later she parodied that role in horror film spoof Scary Movie 3 along with fellow Playmate and actress Pamela Anderson. In 2005, McCarthy produced, wrote, and starred in the movie Dirty Love, where she was again directed by her husband at the time, John Asher. In March 2006, she was given Razzie Awards for "Worst Actress", "Worst Screenplay", and "Worst Picture" for her work on Dirty Love, which also earned Asher a Razzie for "Worst Director."[21]
In addition to her early TV fame on MTV and her short-lived, self-titled NBC sitcom, McCarthy has guest starred in a variety of other television shows including Stacked, Charmed, The Drew Carey Show, Wings, Fastlane, Two and a Half Men and Just Shoot Me!.[citation needed] She was the voice of Six in the third season of Canadian computer-animated science fiction cartoon Tripping the Rift. In 2005, McCarthy hosted a show on E! called Party at the Palms. The reality show, which was filmed at The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, featured hotel guests, party goers, and celebrities.[22]
McCarthy has continued her work with Playboy over the years, both as a model and in other capacities. She appeared on the cover of the magazine's January 2005 issue wearing a leopard skin version of the company's iconic "bunny suit" and was featured in a pictorial shot at Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion in that same issue. She was the second woman (following Carmen Electra) and first former Playmate to become a celebrity photographer for the Playboy Cyber Club, where she photographed model Jennifer Madden.[citation needed]
Jenny's younger sister Amy has also posed for Playboy. She was Cyber Girl of the Week for September 27, 2004, and Cyber Girl of the Month for January, 2005.[23]
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