Jenny McCarthy AutismOne Keynote Speaker

Jenny McCarthy returns again as the AutismOne Keynote speaker. We look forward to another informative and entertaining morning with Jenny. She will deliver her keynote address on Saturday, May 23 at 11:30 AM.

From Playboy model to brazenly fearless comedienne to New York Times best selling author of tell-it-like-it-is “mommy” books; it’s a career path that even surprised Jenny McCarthy… until now.

After a heart wrenching battle to get her son Evan properly diagnosed after he fell terribly ill with seizures at the age of two, to her son’s devastating diagnosis of autism and her arduous journey to find answers and get him healed, Jenny McCarthy has discovered her life’s work. She is determined to use her celebrity to bring attention to a condition that has reached epidemic proportions among pre-school age children: rapidly rising occurrences of autism. Autism is a disturbing Neuro Immune disorder, and one that is shrouded in some mystery and often misunderstood, even by the medical community. Autism severely debilitates a child’s ability to relate to and become properly socialized with other children as well as adults. Autistic children have extremely stunted language and auditory processing abilities, they lack the ability to communicate both verbally and non-verbally and they do not know how to give and receive affection as “typical” children do. Children suffering from autism can become trapped in their own little world if they do not receive early intervention and treatment.

Jenny McCarthy Bio
In 1993 Jenny moved from her native Chicago (where she grew up with three sisters, a stay-at-home mom, and her father, a steel-plant foreman) to Los Angeles in search of stardom. Hollywood auditions proved difficult to come by, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, her forty-seven-year-old manager and live-in boyfriend, to land an interview at MTV. The network's producer appreciated Jenny and hired her to co-host Singled Out, which debuted in the summer of 1995. Funny, telegenic, and curvy Jenny McCarthy had an immediate success. MTV was eager to retain its hot property and coughed up a $500,000, one-year contract that promotes McCarthy to full-fledged VJ and gives her carte blanche to create a program of any format that best suits her talents

Jenny opted to turn over her host responsibilities on Singled Out to Carmen Electra, and concentrate her attention on creating an MTV sketch-variety series, ''The Jenny McCarthy Show'', which is, in her words, ''kind of like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on acid.'' She developed another sitcom for NBC, in which she is an East Coaster who inherits a Hollywood mansion and gets a job as a movie star's personal assistant. Then declined proposals from Fox and NBC, McCarthy is nonetheless venturing beyond teen-oriented cable channels and gentlemen's magazines. She appeared as ''blonde nurse'' in Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995) and, later, portrayed her first substantive screen character (a neurotic movie star) in The Stupids (1996), opposite Tom Arnold.