Jennifer Ann "Jenny" McCarthy (born November 1, 1972) 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 and that chelation therapy helped cure her son of autism. Both claims are unsupported by medical consensus, and her son's autism diagnosis has been questioned. McCarthy has been described as "the nation’s most prominent purveyor of anti-vaxxer ideology", but she has denied the charge.
McCarthy was born in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to a working-class Catholic family, and has Irish, German, 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. Melissa McCarthy is her cousin. 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 described how she was repeatedly bullied by classmates.
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