Jennifer Ann McCarthy-Wahlberg (née McCarthy; born November 1, 1972) is an American actress, model, television personality, 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 went on to have a television and film acting career, beginning as a co-host on the MTV dating game show Singled Out (1995–1997) and afterwards starring in the eponymous sitcom Jenny (1997–1998). Her film roles include 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. From 2013 to 2014, she was a co-host of the ABC talk show The View. Since 2019, McCarthy has been a judge on the Fox musical competition 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 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.
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Early life
McCarthy was born on November 1, 1972, at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She was born to a working-class Catholic family, and has German, Irish, and Polish ancestry. She lived in the West Elsdon neighborhood of Chicago. She is the second of four daughters – her sisters are named Lynette, Joanne, and Amy; actress Melissa McCarthy is her cousin. Her parents, Dan and Linda McCarthy of Orland Park, encouraged all of their kids to be active in high school sports: Lynette ran track; Jenny played softball; and both Amy and Joanne chose basketball. The sisters did gymnastics and bowling as youths. McCarthy's mother, Linda, was a housewife and courtroom custodian, and her father, Dan McCarthy, was a steel mill foreman.
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, although she has referred to herself as an "outcast" at her school and has said she was repeatedly bullied by classmates. She spent two years at Southern Illinois University.
Career
Modeling, acting and broadcasting
In 1993, Playboy magazine offered McCarthy $20,000 to pose for its October issue. McCarthy became the Playmate of the Month for October 1993. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner cited McCarthy's "wholesome Catholic girl" persona as the unique quality for which she was selected out of 10,000 applicants. 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. McCarthy was later made the Playmate of the Year, and was paid a $100,000 salary. 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 co-host a new dating show called Singled Out, she left Hot Rocks. Her job as a co-host was a success, and Playboy wanted her to do more modeling. That same year she also appeared at the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) pay-per-view event WrestleMania XI as a guest valet for Shawn Michaels in his match against WWF Champion, Diesel. She left after the match with the victorious Diesel. McCarthy returned to the promotion, now renamed WWE on the August 2, 2008 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXVI to thank the fans for supporting Generation Rescue, a non-profit organization that promoted the scientifically disproven view that there is a causal link between vaccines and autism and claimed autistic children could "recover" with treatment. 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.
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. 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 Anderson. In 2005, McCarthy produced, wrote, and starred in the film Dirty Love, which was 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".
Public persona
McCarthy once modeled for Candie's, a shoe company. In one magazine ad, McCarthy posed on a toilet seat with her underwear near her ankles. Cultural scholar Collin Gifford Brooke wrote that the ad's "taboo nature" brought it attention, while noting that the ad itself helped to weaken that taboo. Another Candie's ad depicted McCarthy "passing wind" in a crowded elevator.
Activism
Autism activism and views on vaccines
In May 2007, McCarthy announced that Evan had been diagnosed with autism in 2005. McCarthy wrote that he was gifted, a "crystal child", and that she was an "indigo mom".
In a 2014 Daily Beast article she said that her son, then 12, was doing okay: "Evan's amazing, ... He doesn't meet the diagnostic characteristics for autism. He definitely has quirks and issues from the seizures. He has a little bit of brain damage due to his seizures. He doesn't qualify for any more services, but he does have issues in his school." McCarthy served as a spokesperson for Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) from June 2007 until October 2008. She participated in fundraisers, online chats, and other activities for the non-profit organization to help families affected by autism spectrum disorders. Her first fundraiser for TACA, Ante Up for Autism, was held on October 20, 2007, in Irvine, California. She was a prominent spokesperson and activist for Generation Rescue and served on its board of directors as of January 2011. McCarthy was president of the organization when it ceased operations in December 2019.
McCarthy's book dealing with autism, Louder than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism, was published September 17, 2007. She said both in her book and during her appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show that her husband was unable to deal with their son's autism, which led to their divorce. In 2008, she appeared on a Larry King Live special dedicated to the subject and argued that vaccines can trigger autism. As of 2008, her son's physician was vaccine critic Jay Gordon. In an April 27, 2010, PBS Frontline documentary, she was interviewed about the debate between vaccine opponents and public health experts.
In addition to conventional, intensive applied behavior analysis, McCarthy prescribed for her son a gluten-free and casein-free diet, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, chelation, aromatherapies, electromagnetics, spoons rubbed on his body, multivitamin therapy, B-12 shots, and numerous prescription drugs. "Try everything", she advises parents. "It was amazing to watch, over the course of doing this, how certain therapies work for certain kids and they completely don't work for others... When something didn't work for Evan, I didn't stop. I stopped that treatment, but I didn't stop." She has denied that her son was misdiagnosed. McCarthy has claimed on talk shows and at rallies that chelation therapy helped her son recover from autism. The underlying rationale for chelation, the speculation that mercury in vaccines causes autism, has been roundly rejected by scientific studies, with the National Institute of Mental Health concluding that children with autism are unlikely to receive any benefit to balance the risks of heart attack, stroke and cardiac arrest posed by the chelating agents used in the treatment.
Objections to appointment on The View
McCarthy's appointment to The View called forth many protests. Amy Pisani of Every Child By Two wrote a letter to The View's Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie saying that McCarthy's "unfounded claims that vaccines cause autism have been one of the greatest impediments to public health in recent decades", and that McCarthy's assertions "[have] spread fear among young parents, which has led to an increased number of children who have not received life-saving vaccines."
James Poniewozik, a television critic for Time magazine, criticized McCarthy's addition to the series and Walters' endorsement of McCarthy, arguing that The View is largely aimed at parents, on whom the public health system is dependent, and that the credibility that McCarthy's hiring will give her will endanger the public. Poniewozik argued that McCarthy's views, which might be brought up in discussions with the other hosts, would have the effect of framing the issue of whether vaccines cause autism as a matter of opinion, rather than a firmly refuted idea.
David Freeman, senior science editor for The Huffington Post, wrote about the concerns of Bill Nye who said: "I believe Ms. McCarthy's views will be discredited."
Alex Pareene also protested and published a letter to ABC in Salon, entitled "Anti-vaccine conspiracist and 'View' co-host Jenny McCarthy isn't just quirky—she spreads lies that hurt people."
Michael Specter, writing in The New Yorker stated:
"Jenny McCarthy... will be the show's first co-host whose dangerous views on childhood vaccination may—if only indirectly—have contributed to the sickness and death of people throughout the Western world. McCarthy, who is savvy, telegenic, and pulchritudinous, is also the person most visibly associated with the deadly and authoritatively discredited anti-vaccine movement in the United States."
Brendan Nyhan, writing in Columbia Journalism Review, commented: "ABC's announcement yesterday that actress/comedian Jenny McCarthy will become a co-host of The View brought forth a torrent of condemnation from doctors, science journalists, opinion writers, and even entertainment commentators who oppose giving the anti-vaccine activist a high-profile platform to spread misinformation." After an extensive review of news coverage of the hiring, Nyhan concluded that "[t]here is no perfect way to cover McCarthy's hiring, of course, but giving 'balanced' coverage to fringe beliefs is the worst approach to covering misinformation."
Personal life
McCarthy dated manager Ray Manzella from 1994 until 1998 and began dating actor/director John Mallory Asher late in 1998. The couple was engaged in January 1999 and married on September 11 of that year. They have a son, Evan, born in May 2002, who was diagnosed with autism in May 2005. McCarthy and Asher divorced in September 2005.
In December 2005, McCarthy began dating actor Jim Carrey. They did not make their relationship public until June 2006. She announced on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on April 2, 2008, that she and Carrey were living together but had no plans to marry, as they did not need a "piece of paper". Carrey almost made a mock proposal to McCarthy as a promotion for the film Yes Man (2008) for Ellen's Twelve Days of Christmas. In April 2010, McCarthy and Carrey announced that they had split up.
In July 2013, McCarthy stated that she was dating singer and actor Donnie Wahlberg, known for being a member of New Kids on the Block and the television series Blue Bloods. On April 16, 2014, McCarthy announced on The View that she and Wahlberg were engaged, and they married on August 31, 2014.
