Tiger’s most glamorous mistress Mindy Lawton speaks out about the National Enquirer – tampon – Men’s Fitness cover-up

Mindy Lawton, a Perkin’s restaurant manager, is featured in Vanity Fair‘s new Tiger’s Mistress article spilling the beans about the 2007 Enquirer Coverup Scandal that the Wall Street Journal uncovered December, 2009.

These days it’s hard to tell who’s the tabloid and who’s the laudable newspaper, and with The Enquirer up for a Pulitzer, things are getting any murkier. I digress.

The deal is that in 2007 The Enquirer followed Mindy Lawton early one morning when she went for a parking lot tryst with Tiger Woods while she was on the rag. She took out her tampon and flung it on the ground, and the Enquirer reporter quickly nabbed it (hopefully with gloves on, but then again, sometimes you have to do what you have to do for a story.)

They used this smoking tampon (eww, sorry) to threaten to expose Tiger’s cheating, but instead struck a deal for Tiger to do an in depth Men’s Health article (Men’s Health and The National Enquirer are owned by the same parent company American Media Inc.)

Really, that doesn’t sound like much of a trade-off, but it really was kind of a coup because of a deal Tiger had with Gold Digest. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, Gold Digest’s editor Jerry Tarde was very perplexed by the Men’s Health article.

“Under Golf Digest’s contract with Mr. Woods, the monthly, which is owned by Condé Nast Publications Inc., spent as much as $1 million annually on donations to the Tiger Woods Foundation, printing the charity’s annual report and sponsoring many of Mr. Woods’s preferred tournaments, according to a person familiar with the terms. In return, Mr. Woods agreed to contribute monthly articles on golf techniques and limit his appearances in competing publications. Yet never had Golf Digest been granted the level of access to the golfer’s private life allowed for in the article and photo shoot published in Men’s Fitness in August 2007.”

The National Enquirer and American Media Inc. deny that this cover-up ever happened, but now Mindy Lawton is confirming that it did happen.

Although they allegedly didn’t get to topple Tiger in 2007, they finally nailed him in Nov. 2009 with news of his relationship with Rachel Uchitel (who now has a TV job on Extra), givingTiger had three years to continue collecting mistresses.