Jenny McCarthy Biography

Jenny McCarthy is the former Playboy model who has become an actress, TV personality and controversial autism treatment advocate.

Jenny McCarthy got her start posing nude for Playboy magazine in 1993, and ended up becoming the magazine’s 1994 Playmate of the Year. She parlayed that fame into a breakthrough role hosting the MTV dating show Singled Out.

A buxom blonde with a wicked jaw and a goofball bearing, McCarthy was soon being hyped as a Lucille Ball–Marilyn Monroe hybrid. That led to her own sketch comedy show on MTV, The Jenny McCarthy Show, and an NBC sitcom Jenny (1997), as well as film roles. Her movie credits include BASEketball (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Scary Movie 3 (2003, with Pamela Anderson Lee) and John Tucker Must Die (2006).

She dated comedian Jim Carrey from 2005-2010, and together they founded Generation Rescue, a resource for parents of autistic children. McCarthy became controversial for her insistence that vaccines administered to infants can trigger autism. (There is no scientific proof that vaccines cause or create autism. The New York Times described McCarthy’s position as a “widely disproved theory [that] has led to unnecessary illnesses in children, according to child health experts.”)

Nonetheless, McCarthy became a regular guest on the daytime TV talk show The View, and in July of 2013, she was named a permanent member of the show’s five-woman lineup. The job was short-lived: in June of 2014, ABC announced that McCarthy and another co-host, Sherri Shepherd, would not be invited back for the following season.

Jenny McCarthy married Donnie Wahlberg on September 1, 2014. He is a former member of the band New Kids On the Block and the brother of actor Mark Wahlberg. Jenny McCarthy appeared on the family’s reality show Wahlburgers (which ran from 2014-17) and in 2019 became a panelist on the American version of the TV show The Masked Singer.