Part 2: May 6, 2009

A Complicated Question  By MAUREEN DOWD (NY Times)

I had dinner once with John and Elizabeth Edwards, when he first burst onto the national scene.

Looking across the booth at her grinning, boyish husband, she told me that it was irritating to be married to someone so comely who looked so much younger.

She was smiling, but she was telling the truth. The Edwardses reminded me of the Quayles — smooth, pretty boys married to tough, smart women they’d met at law school.

Elizabeth Edwards would have made a wonderful candidate herself. But she poured everything into John. And then John betrayed her. And then John betrayed his staffers, going ahead with the 2008 campaign, letting his disciples work around the clock because they believed in him and what he was running on, even though the Edwardses knew it could implode at any minute because of John’s entanglement with Rielle Hunter.

Like Monica and Gennifer before her, Rielle was not a discreet choice. She inspired the literary character of Alison Poole, “an ostensibly jaded, sexually voracious” New York party girl who had the lead in Jay McInerney’s novel “Story of My Life” and in a short story in his new book, “How It Ended,” as well as a couple of walk-ons in novels by Bret Easton Ellis.

What unimaginable stress, to learn that you were trying to make your husband president at the same time his mistress was making a baby that could well be his. And while you were raising young kids and battling deadly cancer.

“He should not have run,” Elizabeth Edwards writes in her new book, “Resilience.”

John told her a little about Rielle a few days after he announced in 2006, and she told him to drop out to “protect our family from this woman, from his act,” she writes.

She said she cried, screamed and threw up when she found out. But she ended up going along, helping sell the voters on her husband’s character as a truth teller and charm as a loving husband and father. She had put so many quarters in the shiny slot machine of their mutual ambition. It was hard to walk away.

Just as it’s hard to walk away from her desire to prosecute her husband and his former girlfriend now in public, while still taking the marriage “month by month.”

John Edwards’s political career is over, and he’s being investigated by the feds about whether he used campaign funds to underwrite his affair. Nobody — except Rielle — has any interest in hearing from him again. Americans would have been relieved if the last we heard of him was that cringe-inducing “Nightline” interview last year, when he made the argument that he was a helpless narcissist and that he hit on Rielle when Elizabeth’s cancer was in remission.

But now Saint Elizabeth has dragged him back into the public square for a flogging on “Oprah” and in Time and at bookstores near you. The book is billed as helping people “facing life’s adversities” and offering an “inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges.”

But it’s just a gratuitous peek into their lives, and one that exposes her kids, by peddling more dregs about their personal family life in a book, and exposes the ex-girlfriend who’s now trying to raise the baby girl, a dead ringer for John Edwards, in South Orange, N.J.

Elizabeth said when they married, the only gift she asked John for was to be faithful.

“It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”

She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men.

Like Hillary with Monica, the feminist struck out at the girlfriend, implying that Rielle was a wacky stalker.

“We’re basically old-fashioned people,” Elizabeth told O magazine. “So this was a pretty big leap for him. Maybe it’s being so different is what was attractive.”

She’s still helping her husband hedge on Rielle’s baby, whom she refers to as “it,” telling Oprah that she has “no idea” if the baby is John’s, and adding: “It doesn’t look like my children, but I don’t have any idea.”

Asked by Oprah in a taping for Thursday’s show whether she’s still in love with her husband, she replied, “You know, that’s a complicated question.”

The really complicated question is what she hopes to gain from this book.

Part 3

For Edwards, Drama Builds Toward a Denouement
By NEIL A. LEWIS (NY Times, September 20, 2009)
CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—The story of the spectacular rise and fall of John Edwards, with its sordid can’t-look-away dimensions, is moving slowly but deliberately to its conclusion here in North Carolina.
Mr. Edwards, the one-term senator who came close to being elected vice president in 2004 and ran a credible campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, remains largely secluded at his 100-acre estate here.
But a federal grand jury in nearby Raleigh is investigating whether any crimes were committed in connection with campaign laws in an effort to conceal his extramarital affair with a woman named Rielle Hunter. At the same time, Mr. Edwards is moving toward an abrupt reversal in his public posture; associates said in interviews that he is considering declaring that he is the father of Ms. Hunter’s 19-month-old daughter, something that he once flatly asserted in a television interview was not possible.
Friends and other associates of Mr. Edwards and his wife of 32 years, Elizabeth, say she has resisted the idea of her husband’s claiming paternity. Mrs. Edwards, who is battling cancer, “has yet to be brought around,” said one family friend, who like others spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity, pointing to the complicated and delicate nature of the issue.
The situation may become more fraught, as people who know Ms. Hunter said she was planning to move with her daughter, Frances, from New Jersey to North Carolina in coming months.
For her grand jury appearance on Aug. 6, Ms. Hunter took her daughter to the federal courthouse in downtown Raleigh. As she walked in, she seemed to turn the girl’s face toward the local television cameras.
Ms. Hunter testified to the grand jury in detail about her relationship with Mr. Edwards, lawyers involved in the case said, as well as the benefits she was provided by his supporters after she became pregnant. Michael Crichtley, her lawyer, declined to comment.
According to people familiar with the grand jury investigation, prosecutors are considering a complicated and novel legal issue: whether payments to a candidate’s mistress to ensure her silence (and thus maintain the candidate’s viability) should be considered campaign donations and thus whether they should be reported. When Mr. Edwards was running for president, and later when he still held out hope of a cabinet position in the Obama administration, two of his wealthy patrons, through a once-trusted Edwards aide, quietly provided Ms. Hunter with large financial benefits, including a new BMW and lodging, that were used to keep her out of public view.
Mr. Edwards dismissed an initial report in The National Enquirer in 2007 that he was having an affair, and the matter was largely ignored by the mainstream news media. But in July 2008, The Enquirer published an article with photographs of a clandestine meeting Mr. Edwards had with Ms. Hunter and her daughter in a Los Angeles hotel. Days later, Mr. Edwards acknowledged the affair to “Nightline” on ABC, offering contrition but insisting that the child could not be his because of the timing and brevity of their intimacy.
Wade M. Smith, a Raleigh lawyer who represents Mr. Edwards, declined to comment on the paternity issue directly, but said in a statement that “there may be a statement on that subject at some point, but there is no timetable and we will see how we feel about it as events unfold.”
The notion that Mr. Edwards is the father has been reinforced by the account of Andrew Young, once a close aide to Mr. Edwards, who had signed an affidavit asserting that he was the father of Ms. Hunter’s child.
Mr. Young, who has since renounced that statement, has told publishers in a book proposal that Mr. Edwards knew all along that he was the child’s father. He said Mr. Edwards pleaded with him to accept responsibility falsely, saying that would reduce the story to one of an aide’s infidelity.
In the proposal, which The New York Times examined, Mr. Young says that he assisted the affair by setting up private meetings between Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter. He wrote that Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.
Once the favorite son of much of North Carolina with many supporters beyond, John Edwards is now largely disdained. To many, it was not only his liaison with Ms. Hunter, but also what seemed his elaborate effort to cover up his behavior to preserve his political ambitions.
Shortly after he withdrew from the race in January 2008, Mr. Edwards and his wife were given a huge ovation when they attended a basketball game at the University of North Carolina. But a few months ago, when the couple showed up for dinner at a Chapel Hill restaurant, diners averted their eyes and stared at their plates, according to a person who was there.
At the recent Boston funeral of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Mrs. Edwards walked several steps ahead of her husband, greeting people exuberantly. Far fewer people approached Mr. Edwards, who appeared ill at ease.
Investigators are examining the benefits Ms. Hunter received from the two Edwards supporters, Fred Baron, a wealthy trial lawyer from Dallas who has since died, and Rachel Mellon, known as Bunny, a 99-year-old heiress to the Mellon fortune. Before his death, Mr. Baron said in a statement that he paid Ms. Hunter and helped move her and Mr. Young to California and other places on his own initiative, without informing Mr. Edwards. Mr. Edwards has asserted that he knew nothing of the benefits provided to Ms. Hunter by Mr. Baron or Mrs. Mellon.
In his book proposal, however, Mr. Young depicts Mr. Baron as going to great lengths to help a knowing and eager Mr. Edwards conceal from the public both his affair with Ms. Hunter and his paternity of her daughter. At one point, Mr. Young wrote, Mr. Edwards asked Mr. Baron if he could find a doctor who would falsify a DNA report.
Mr. Smith, Mr. Edwards’s lawyer, declined to comment on any of Mr. Young’s allegations. Mr. Edwards has not appeared before the grand jury.
Alex Forger, a New York lawyer who represents Mrs. Mellon, said in an interview that she had admired Mr. Edwards for his environmental views and that when told by Mr. Young that Mr. Edwards needed financial assistance for some nonpolitical purpose, she agreed to help.
“The request came from Andrew Young that the senator needed some funds for personal use,” Mr. Forger said. He said that at the time of the payments, Mrs. Mellon had not met Ms. Hunter, did not know of her and was unaware that she was the recipient of the money.
Joe Sinsheimer, a former Democratic consultant who has monitored the Edwards investigation, said it would be difficult for prosecutors to make a case because “the law probably doesn’t anticipate payments to a mistress during a campaign.”
While violations of campaign finance regulations are not necessarily crimes and may be punished by fines from the Federal Election Commission, they can also break criminal laws if there is evidence of willful deception.
The prosecutors are also examining some $114,000 paid by the Edwards campaign to Ms. Hunter for a series of short campaign videos she produced. About $14,000 of that money was paid to her well after the videos were produced, some through transfers from accounts and listed as for furniture purchases.
Ms. Hunter gave her daughter the middle name Quinn, and people who have spoken with her said its resemblance to the Latin prefix for five was to proclaim that the baby was Mr. Edwards’s fifth child. (He had four with Mrs. Edwards, the oldest of whom was killed in a car accident).
Any acknowledgment of paternity would have ramifications for Mr. Edwards, who could suffer a further blow to his credibility but could also be praised for belatedly accepting responsibility. It could also shift Ms. Hunter’s image from that of a predatory celebrity stalker (Mrs. Edwards told Oprah Winfrey that Ms. Hunter met her husband after waiting for him to come out of a New York hotel and telling him, “You’re so hot.”) to that of a mother concerned about her child’s rights.
Mrs. Edwards last month opened a furniture store called Red Window in downtown Chapel Hill, and on a recent weekday several women examined the chairs, tables and knickknacks crowded into a small space. She was not there.
People familiar with Ms. Hunter said she was planning to move soon to the Wilmington area, near where the Edwardses have a second home on an island with restricted access.
Motoko Rich contributed reporting from New York.

Part 4 Friday, Jan. 29, 2010,

How He Got Caught: The elaborate tricks John Edwards used to keep his affair secret—and why they failed.
By Christopher Beam (Slate.com)

Among the revelations in Andrew Young’s new book about John Edwards is that once the whole sordid truth about Edwards and Rielle Hunter emerged, Bill Clinton “called the senator and said, in effect, ‘How’d you get caught?’ ” It’s not a surprising question, given the source. But the better question may be how Edwards got away with it for so long.

Between early 2006, when the senator’s dalliance with his campaign videographer began, and August 2008, when he confessed to it, Edwards engaged in all sorts of subterfuges in an attempt to hide his liaison with Hunter from his wife, his staff, and the press. The Politician, written by Edwards’ primary romantic facilitator, provides a blow-by-blow account how he did it—and why he failed. Consider this list a kind of public service to any elected official ever considering a secret romp.

Get a cell phone and use it exclusively for your affair. Once the affair took off, Edwards bought a cell phone to take calls exclusively from Hunter, which he dubbed the “Batphone.” Edwards failed, however, to keep the phone hidden from his wife. Elizabeth discovered it ringing one night in his bag, answered it, and heard Hunter launch into a “romantic monologue.” That’s when Edwards confessed to Elizabeth that he’d had a “one-night stand.” (An understatement.) From then on, Edwards and Young arranged handoffs so Edwards wouldn’t have the Batphone while Elizabeth was around.

Use your calling plan’s enhanced features. When Edwards didn’t have the Batphone, Young set up three-way conference calls and had both Edwards and Hunter dial-in. That way there would be no record of the call when Elizabeth would check Edwards’ call log, as she routinely did.

Make fake hotel reservations. When Hunter traveled with Edwards, Young would reserve a room in his own name and tell the hotel staff that his “wife” would be checking in on that account. That way, there would be no evidence Hunter stayed in the hotel. Hunter would then join Edwards in his suite and leave before aides came to wake him up.

Use separate doors. And don’t forget to stagger your entrances. Heading back to the campaign office in South Carolina after a rally, Edwards had Young drop him off in the parking garage, and he took the elevator up. Hunter entered through the front, where she ran into Elizabeth. Elizabeth later “confronted her husband about the glowing blond woman who had obviously arrived with him from the road.”

Use cash. When Edwards gave Hunter his bank card, Elizabeth noticed money inexplicably withdrawn in New York. From then on, Edwards—through Young—gave her cash stipends and her own separate credit card. As one Edwards donor tells Young: “Old Chinese proverb: Use cash, not credit cards.”

Funnel money. When Edwards started paying Hunter’s living expenses, the money came from the nonagenarian philanthropist Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, who didn’t ask any questions about where the cash was going. Mellon would pay her interior decorator, who would pass the money along to Young. The cash would be concealed in boxes of chocolates.

Destroy all evidence. Edwards was not as careful as he could have been. At one point, Edwards’ nanny discovered a Marriott key card on the kitchen counter. Young noticed that when Edwards would receive notes from “eager women” on the campaign trail, he “occasionally pocketed” them instead of handing them off for disposal. And many nights, Edwards would take mysterious 2 a.m. “jogs.”

Seriously, destroy all evidence. Elizabeth spent days going through the footage Hunter shot for the never-aired “Webisodes” of the Edwards campaign, searching for evidence of cheating. However, she was never able to find the tapes shot at the Edwards house while she was away. Young and his wife later allegedly found a half-destroyed tape, allegedly shot by Hunter, of her and the senator allegedly having sex. Allegedly. (Hunter has now filed for a restraining order to keep Young from releasing it.)

Don’t canoodle in front of aides. While Elizabeth was on a book tour in 2006, Hunter came over to Edwards’ house and the two spoke openly in front of Young about getting married in a rooftop ceremony with music played by the Dave Matthews Band. (The band didn’t like her when they met her.) Hunter and Edwards would kiss in front of Young and cuddle in front other another aide, prompting him to ask Young, “What the hell is going on?”

Choose a discreet lover. Hunter was a noticeable presence on the trail, according to Young. She dressed in bright colors, talked loudly, and flirted constantly. She spoke to “close friends” about their affair, but trusted them because of their “spiritual connection.” She recounted their sexual exploits to Young and his wife. She even talked to Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman about having an affair with a powerful man whom she wouldn’t name. (Darman knew she worked with the Edwards campaign.) When rumors of the affair started circulating, she continued to risk getting spotted in hotel lobbies and grocery stores. “I think she wanted to get caught,” Young writes.

Maintain plausible deniability. Even after Young learned about the affair, Edwards continued to use vague language while on the phone with Hunter—just in case he or Young, who overheard them, had to deny it. When Hunter said she loved him, Edwards “would say only, ‘Me too.’ And if she asked him if he missed her, he would say, ‘That’s correct’ … but never, ‘I miss you.’ ” On calls with Young, top Edwards donor Fred Baron would refer to Edwards as “the principal” and to Hunter as “her.”

Don’t sign any cards you send to the new mother of your child. When Hunter gave birth to their daughter, Frances Quinn Hunter, Young asked Edwards if he wanted to send her flowers. “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Edwards said. “But don’t sign it from me. Someone might see it.

Wear a condom. Edwards claims that Hunter told him she couldn’t get pregnant. You know the rest.

Christopher Beam is a Slate political reporter. Follow him on Twitter.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2243109/