Jenny McCarthy, American actress and model
Jennifer McCarthy Wahlberg (née Jennifer Ann McCarthy; born November 1, 1972) is an American actress, model, activist, television personality, and author. She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year. McCarthy then had a television and film acting career, starting as a co-host on the MTV game show Singled Out (1995–1997), then some eponymous sitcoms including Jenny (1997–1998) and Donnie Loves Jenny (2015–2016), as well as films, such as BASEketball (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Dirty Love (2005), John Tucker Must Die (2006), and Santa Baby (2006). In 2013, she hosted her own television talk show The Jenny McCarthy Show, and became a co-host of the ABC talk show The View, appearing until 2014. Since 2019, McCarthy has been a judge on the Fox musical competition show The Masked Singer.
McCarthy has written several books about parenting and has promoted research into environmental causes and alternative medical treatments for autism. She has promoted the disproven idea that vaccines cause autism, and said that chelation therapy, a quack remedy, helped cure her son of autism. McCarthy's proselytization of these views has been called "dangerous", "reckless", and "uninformed". She has been described by journalists as "the nation's most prominent purveyor of anti-vaxxer ideology" and "the face of the anti-vaxx movement". She disputes the anti-vaccine label, saying she prefers the term "pro-safe-vaccine-schedule", a term that has met strong criticism.