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Jennifer Ann McCarthy-Wahlberg (née McCarthy; born November 1, 1972) is an American actress, model, and television personality. 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, beginning as a co-host on the MTV game show Singled Out (1995–1997) and afterwards starring in the eponymous sitcom Jenny (1997–1998), as well as films including 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 on the program 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.

Early life
McCarthy was born on November 1, 1972, at Little Company of Mary Hospital located in the southwest Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Illinois. 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. 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.