Heather North, the nanny, was one of the few people who knew what I knew about the Edwardses and Rielle Hunter, and there were times when she and I compared notes. These talks were part gossip and part mutual support, which we needed, considering the stress that comes with keeping secrets. We were both struck by the midlife crisis aspect of John Edwards’s affair and how he had obviously found in Rielle someone who was his wife’s opposite. A New Age drifter who made her own rules, Rielle was always working the “fun-and-single-blonde” angle. She was someone who offered sex, spiritual advice, or good company as you had a few drinks. Mrs. Edwards looked like who she was-a highly educated, middle-aged mother, cancer victim, and wife of thirty years.
As different as they were in style and background, Rielle and Mrs. Edwards were both ambitious and self-confident. Both were certain that John Edwards should be president and that if he was elected, the world would be a much better place. And they both believed in the power of their own insight and intuition. Mrs. Edwards followed hers to guide the campaign. Rielle relied on hers to advise the senator personally. Finally, they were both insecure about the future and the senator’s true intentions. These feelings led Mrs. Edwards to try to push me out of John Edwards’s life. They led Rielle to depend on me to connect her to him. I was squarely in the middle.
On the day the senator went home to deal with the recurrence of his wife’s cancer, Rielle called me at least half a dozen times to complain ~ about spending her birthday alone. “He loves me,” she would say, “and it’s just not right that we’re not together.”
In the weeks that followed, Rielle seethed over the attention Mrs. Edwards received from the media, but she also celebrated the jump in the senator’s poll numbers. We spoke every day, usually more than once. With his schedule in hand, Rielle was able to meet him in various hotels when he was campaigning without his wife. However, the rules of engagement, so to speak, had changed as Mrs. Edwards had become keenly aware of Rielle Hunter. She monitored call histories on phones (at least those she could locate) and called her husband many times a day when he was away. Mrs. Edwards also forbade hotel operators from transferring calls from women to his room and regularly changed his check-in pseudonym.
More concerned than ever about being caught, the senator required Rielle to be as furtive as possible. When he was in New York, she could no longer wait in the hotel lobby and then go up to his room. Instead, she had to hang out in a bar next door and hope to either catch sight of the entourage entering or wait to receive a cell phone call. During one of these stakeouts, she looked up to see John Davis, the body man, enter and take a seat at the counter, which was between her and the door. Panicked, Rielle ran to the restroom and hid. After a long wait, the woman who had served her a drink came to ask if she was all right. Rielle told her a tale about how she was hiding from one of the customers, and the kindly waitress let her slip out a back door.
The drama excited Rielle, as did the sense of power she felt as a secret insider with a direct line to a man who could become president of the United States. She followed his every move on the twenty-four-hour news channels and the Internet and spoke to him numerous times every day on the Batphone or via a three-way call. He felt calmed by Rielle and wanted to talk to her before every debate and major event. She believed her spiritual blessings were vital to his success. When she couldn’t get through to him directly, because he was at home without the special phone or Elizabeth was around, she called me incessantly.
In late April, Rielle called and left me a message while she was watching a televised debate. It was the first to include all eight Democratic Party candidates. She seemed happy with the senator’s performance until the end, when he was asked to name a person he considered a moral leader. After mentioning Jesus Christ and before naming his father, he said, “My wife, who I think is the finest human being I have ever known, is a source of great conscience for me.” Over the phone, Rielle groaned and said that if Elizabeth Edwards was anyone’s moral leader, “we’re all going to hell.”
Although it’s difficult to say she showed a whole lot of conscience about the way she conducted herself (I never saw her troubled by doubt after she indulged in a tirade or fired a staffer), Mrs. Edwards was quick to criticize others for what she believed were displays of moral weakness or bad behavior. This trait was on full display when she publicly scolded Ann Coulter for lying about her husband.
The Coulter conflict arose after the right-wing commentator used the word faggot in connection with the senator and talked about how she wished he had been assassinated. Mrs. Edwards surprised her by calling into the Chris Matthews TV show Hardball and getting on the air to ask her to quit the personal attacks. It was good theater, but I didn’t understand why a potential First Lady would engage in debate with an insult comic like Coulter. But influencing Coulter was not the point. Mrs. Edwards called the show on an impulse. It caught the senator and the campaign staff by surprise. She wanted to defend her husband, and her ever stronger performance as a campaigner had given her the standing and the courage to act.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Edwards’s courage often empowered her to express frustration and anger in clumsy ways. In the call to Hardball, she was more emotional than reasoned, and she came off sounding like a scold. She was similarly off pitch when she gave an interview in which she complained about the media focus on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the advantage minority status gave their campaigns.
“We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman,” she said. “These things get you a lot of press… [and] fund-raising dollars.”
These comments brought criticism from those who thought she was whining and found it awfully hard to work up sympathy for a white Southern man with enormous wealth and privilege. But like the Hardball call, they did energize Mrs. Edwards’s more fervent supporters, who saw her as the spunky wife saying what needed to be said on behalf of the best candidate. Of course, they didn’t know that even as she stood up for him, John Edwards was continuing to betray her and that the threat posed by the force of nature that was Rielle Hunter had already become much worse.
By May 2007, Rielle and I were in constant communication. I had never known a woman who needed more attention, but on the day I received four calls in the space of an hour, I knew something unusual was going on. The senator was traveling with his wife (no Batphone) and about to begin taping an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Having deflected Rielle three times, I answered the fourth call feeling irritated and almost angry.
“Somebody better be dying or pregnant,” I said.
“Nobody’s dying,” sobbed Rielle. She then threatened to go to the press with evidence of their affair-she was Camera Girl, and she had plenty of pictures-if I didn’t find a way to connect her with Senator Edwards immediately.
The senator had told John Davis to always accept my calls, no matter where he was, and he was one of the few people in the campaign who had expressed suspicions about Rielle. He tried to brush me off, but I was adamant and said, “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”
During a break in the taping, Davis managed tƒDavo pull the senator aside and get him to call me from a private spot. I shouldn’t have been startled by his initial response to what was happening-he asked me to “handle it”-since I had fixed a thousand problems for him in the past. This time I said, “I can’t handle this one,” and he agreed to talk to her.
Whatever he said kept Rielle quiet, temporarily. Later that day, cussing and barely under control, he would tell me that Rielle had long claimed she was physically unable to get pregnant and that since she was “a crazy slut” and they had an “open” relationship, he thought there was only a “one-in-three chance” that he could be the father of her baby. He told me she should get an abortion and asked me to help persuade her to do it.
The next time I spoke with Rielle, she said that the senator had told her to get an abortion. I am pro-choice, but when she asked me what I would do, I thought about my kids and said I wouldn’t go through with an abortion. She talked about how she was a forty-two-year-old woman who wanted to have a child before she got too old. She also believed that the baby she was carrying-a combination of his intellectual brilliance and her spiritual superiority-was some kind of golden child, the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who was going to help save the world. There was no way she was going to have an abortion.
Instead, pregnant Rielle would require more attention and support than ever before, and this would cost a lot of money. Even though he possessed a fortune worth tens of millions of dollars, the senator had no way to access this money without his wife finding out. This problem had become especially acute in the months since Mrs. Edwards had learned about Rielle, and was complicated by the financial stress related to their new home.
For years the Edwardses had spent freely, but as they built their mansion, they realized that more money was going out than was coming in. First they accused their closest aides-including me-of abusing the access to funds they had granted us in order to help keep their various households going. Once these spending streams were stopped, they then imposed stricter accounting for their own expenses. Unable to sneak any cash out of this system, the senator asked me to pay for Rielle’s silence. He suggested I draw on the profit Cheri and I had realized in the sale of our Lake Wheeler house, which was reserved for the new place. (He promised I would be repaid.)
I had already covered some of Rielle’s expenses, and as a minor player in the macho games of scheming, high-powered men, I think a part of me would have felt proud to say I was rich enough to offer the senator this favor. But even as he asked me to use money that was, by rights, Cheri’s as well as mine, the senator begged me to hide everything about Rielle from her. He asked this because he understood that what he was doing was shameful, and sensed that Cheri had never trusted him as I did. Of course, I couldn’t do what he asked. I had already told Cheri everything. She was well aware of Rielle, and disapproved of the way the senator was putting his wife and children at risk. And now that Rielle was pregnant, this was obviously a long-term project and we didn’t have the funds to support her lifestyle.
Once I was crossed off the list of potential donors, Edwards suggested David Kirby. The senator thought that Kirby owed him support because of all the big jury awards he had won for their firm, but Kirby did not agree. I suggested an appeal to Fred Baron, but the senator said, “Fred’s got a big mouth, and he’s too close to the Clintons.” Finally we focused on Bunny Mellon, who had made it clear she would give Edwards money for extraneous expenses with no explanation required. Edwards called her, and “the Bunny money” began to flow. To make her feel rewarded for this aid, the senator stayed in touch by calling her from the road. In June, he called her from backstage in Manchester, New Hampshire, just prior to a nationally televised candidates debate. (On that same evening, I was attending a function at my kids’ school-it was “Spanish Night”-and the senator called demanding I help him contact Rielle. Cell phone reception was poor at the school, so I had to leave the event to facilitate a three-way call.)
Bunny’s checks, written for many hundreds of thousands of dollars, were made as payments to her decorator, Bryan Huffman, so that she wouldn’t have to offer an explanation to the professionals who handled her accounts. These funds (and the money that came from Fred Baron later) were gifts, entirely proper, and not subject to campaign finance laws. She did not know that the money was being used in part for Rielle. Bunny sent the checks to Bryan hidden in boxes of chocolate and with notes discussing her contributions to “the confederacy.” Bryan sent them to me with notes of his own. One said, “A little table money,” because the memo line indicated it was payment for an antique table. Another said, “For the rescue of America,” which was how Bunny referred to the way she used her money on behalf of Democrats in general and John Edwards in particular. After I received each check, it was deposited in joint accounts I held with Cheri, to be used to keep Rielle happy and hidden from the media, Mrs. Edwards, and anyone who might divulge her existence. This was the arrangement the senator expected me to follow, so that he would have “plausible deniability.”
In accepting the checks and responsibility for Rielle, I plunged myself, Cheri, and my kids into hot water. The temperature wasn’t so high that it was uncomfortable, so we stayed in the pot. And like frogs that will remain submerged in a pot on a stove while an experimenter raises the temperature ever so slowly, we would stay in this situation far too long, enduring as each new demand increased the heat by a fraction of a degree. Unlike frogs, we would get out before it was too late. But looking back, I find it hard to believe that we didn’t hop away on the day Rielle arrived at our house with photographers from the National Enquirer hot on her trail.
For months, Rielle had complained to me about how her boyfriend, now the father of her child, neglected her. She also talked to her “close friends,” who she said would never betray her because of their “spiritual connections.” One of these friends was Newsweek writer Jonathan Darman, who spoke with her on the phone from time to time and once had lunch with her. (She talked with him about having an affair with a very powerful man but wouldn’t divulge his identity.) Whenƒide I talked with her, Rielle requested my help with financial and emotional concerns and every once in a while threatened to go to the press and reveal the affair. Rielle was especially outraged on July 30 when the Edwardses marked their thirtieth anniversary by renewing their wedding vows and celebrating at Wendy’s. The event got extensive coverage from the media, including pictures in People magazine and a bit of fawning from Diane Sawyer of ABC-TV’s Good Morning America.
Besides my having to deal with the senator’s mistress, the summer brought new personal demands as the builder began work on our new house and we moved out of the smelly purple mansion and into a big, luxurious house owned by former UNC and NBA basketball player Eric Montross. I knew him, and when he told me he had been having trouble selling the place, we made a deal for a lease. The house was in a gated development called the Governors Club. It had four bedrooms, and the screened backyard gave our dog, Meebo, a great place to hang out. The only odd thing about the house was that all the furnishings-sink, shower, countertops, cabinets, and so on-had been built for someone seven feet tall.
In this time period, I was especially busy at work, which meant Cheri couldn’t rely on me as she helped the kids adjust to new schools and a new neighborhood. She was driving hours every day to take care of my mom’s second husband, Warren, a wonderful man whose health was deteriorating rapidly. Warren’s decline and death took a terrible toll on my mom, and as I focused on helping her, the National Enquirer, notorious for revealing then presidential candidate Gary Hart’s affair with Donna Rice in 1987, found Rielle in South Orange, New Jersey. On September 27, 2007, they confronted her at her friend Mimi Hockman’s house, where she stayed when she wasn’t on the road.
How did the Enquirer even know to start looking for Rielle Hunter? The answer to this question may never be known, but she would be a good person to ask. With all of her threats, she certainly had in mind a call to the media. Mimi Hockman would be another person to question. Inside the campaign there were no likely suspects, but the Internet had begun to buzz with innuendo. The most prominent source for speculation was Sam Stein of the Web site HuffingtonPost.com.
On the day before the photographers confronted her in New Jersey, Stein posted a report on his attempts to find and view the webisodes produced for the Edwards campaign. Once readily available online, they had suddenly disappeared. Stein couldn’t locate the producer, Rielle Hunter, and his effort to find her company led him to Mimi Hockman, who answered his e-mail request for an interview with, “Nope. Not a chance.” More digging brought Stein to an article about Rielle in a New Age magazine called Breathe, which said she was a “formerly hard-partying girl who claims that she found enlightenment.”
Stein reported all he had discovered and the fact that he was given the runaround by the Edwards staff, especially Jonathan Prince, who also had suspicions about Rielle. Prince had offered implausible explanations for the disappearance of the videos, claimed that the campaign no longer had them, and then offered to let Stein view them, but only with Edwards’s representatives in the rooƒivem. Prince’s handling inflamed the situation, and all the bobbing, weaving, and mystery allowed Stein to write in a way that made any reader imagine hanky-panky was involved. He ended with a quote from Edwards that said, “I’ve come to the conclusion I just want the country to see who I really am,” and a quip of his own: “I’m still waiting to see.” The senator was outraged by this and said that “Clinton is behind it” and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were friends with Stein and had urged him to write the article.
Given the number of people who saw Rielle on the campaign trail, staffers who suspected something was going on, and those-including Rielle-who could confirm the affair, it was no surprise that rumors had been swirling for months. According to the whispers, clean-cut John Edwards, who made an issue of morality, was stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife. The staff of the Enquirer almost certainly had the story staked out, and the Stein article could well have added the piece to the puzzle that brought them to Mimi Hockman’s house.
Panicked, Rielle called me several times during the day, insisting I connect her with the senator. Now that Rielle was pregnant, I never had any trouble getting through to him. John Davis took my call, asking, “Can’t it wait five minutes?” I told him no, and he pulled the senator away from whatever he was doing and gave him the phone. I told him the Enquirer was outside Rielle’s house and patched him through to her. After he soothed her, he called me back and said he was afraid that Rielle was going to crack and go outside to meet the Enquirer team and tell all. She obviously needed to go someplace and hide, and according to the senator, she had no trustworthy friends or family to visit. The temporary solution, he decided, would be for her to come to stay behind the gates at the Governors Club with Cheri and me.
“This is bigger than any of us,” he said, evoking the many causes-peace, health care, poverty, and so on-that he represented. This struck me as disingenuous and I really wasn’t listening. I was thinking about what I was going to tell Cheri. We were both mourning my stepfather, and were about to fly to Shelter Island, New York, for his funeral. This wasn’t going to go over well.
When I finally agreed with his plan, the senator said, “Andrew, nobody has ever done something like this for me. You are the best friend I ever had in the world.” I put down the phone and walked into the kitchen to find Cheri. Her reaction was what you might expect.
“Are you kidding me?”
“We just have to deal with this. I know it’s ridiculous. But it’s not going to be for very long.”
Cheri had seen so much crazy stuff where the Edwardses were concerned that she wasn’t exactly surprised. Instead, she was angry and disgusted. But she trusted me enough to just shake her head in a weary way and say okay.
Rielle caught a flight on American Airlines and arrived at the Raleigh airport at about nine-thirty P.M. She came out of the terminal wearing tight jeans, sunglasses, and the long pink scarf that was her signature accessory. I drove her to the house in the four-wheel-drive convertible Jeep I had bought once Mrs. Edwards barred me from driving her husband and I no longer needed the Suburban. I had the top off, and Rielle complained about the rough ride all the way down Interstate 40 and through the security gate at the Governors Club. When she got to the house, which was a pretty impressive million-dollar place, her mood changed. She followed me up to the door as I carried her bag. As she entered the foyer, which was lit by a big chandelier, she took a spin like Mary Tyler Moore’s whirl in the opening of the 1970s TV show and cried, “I’m heeeeere!” As she squealed, her sunglasses flew off her head.
Cheri was as kind as she could be for a wife greeting the mistress of her husband’s boss at ten-thirty P.M. She welcomed Rielle and listened as she excitedly told us how she had evaded the photographers and escaped to North Carolina. Rielle has an almost childish voice and the Valley girl habit of making statements in a tone that rises at the end of the sentence, making it sound as if she’s asking a question. She laughed a lot and spoke about her day as if it had been an adventure. She seemed to like the idea that she was being pursued. She genuinely admired John Edwards and believed she could help him present himself to the world in a more effective and appealing way. But she also liked the power that came with being the woman with a secret that could bring down a presidential candidate.
The next morning, when the kids awakened to find a strange lady in the house, we explained that she worked with me and she needed our help. This explanation seemed to be enough (we had had many staffers stay with us over the years), and since Rielle barely interacted with the kids or even showed much interest in them, they didn’t ask many questions. We had to leave town for my stepfather’s funeral, and when we came back, the senator told me to rent a house in the Governors Club where Rielle could live by herself. This seemed the best option for keeping her quiet and safe during the pregnancy. It would also allow the senator to come visit by claiming to have an appointment with me.
With funds supplied by Bunny Mellon, who did not know the nature of the expenses she covered, I signed a year long $2,900-per-month lease on a house for Rielle that was less than half a mile away from mine. We went together to buy her a $28,000 BMW. (She approved the “energy” of the car based on color, styling, and extras like a sunroof and premium sound system.) And I got her a credit card under the name R. Jaya (Sanskrit for “Victory”) James. This name change was her idea, and it was inspired, of course, by Jesse James. We tried to call her Jaya but often slipped and called her Rielle. For my purposes here, I’ll stick with Rielle.
Rielle lived with us for about two weeks while waiting for the lease on her place to start. She had some annoying habits, like using her hands to pick at her food or refusing to let the kids watch cartoons on TV if she was interested in catching theƒin news. The senator came to see her at least twice in this period, and I was there for one of his arrivals. He drove from his place in his Chrysler Pacifica, which I had arranged for him to buy as a symbol of his all-American family man persona. For a disguise, he wore aviator sunglasses and a ball cap pulled down low, which was pretty silly considering the EDWARDS FOR PRESIDENT bumper stickers plastered all over the rear end of the van. I met him at the security gate, and he followed me through the development to the Montross house; the garage door opened automatically, and he steered into the garage so he could access the house without being seen. Cheri and the kids and I stayed away, and later Rielle told me they had exciting, clandestine, we’re-in-this-thing-together sex. Fortunately for us, they used the guest bedroom.
The senator’s risk taking made Rielle feel she was his true love. She talked constantly about how Edwards was fighting against his “destiny” and that he should “let the universe take him where he is supposed to go.” At the top of this agenda was honesty, she said, and for this reason she protested how he asked her to “live a lie” by hiding the relationship. Every time she heard the senator mention how much he loved his cancer-stricken wife-this line was a campaign staple offered primarily to women voters-Rielle became angry and resentful. Over and over again, she said she didn’t know how much longer she could violate her superior moral code by staying silent. But then we would go shopping for a car, or the deliveryman would arrive with something she’d bought over the Internet, and her impatience would subside. It seemed like every few minutes I got an e-mail confirming a purchase Rielle had made from Pierre Deux, Restoration Hardware, or The Children’s Place.
Empowered with a credit card and money that unknowingly came from Bunny, through me, Rielle furnished all four bedrooms (including one for the baby) along with the other living spaces, and bought clothes, kitchen-ware, draperies, and linens. I was on call whenever she needed curtains hung or furniture assembled, and we gave her a reference to use the obstetrician who delivered our babies. Cheri did Rielle’s grocery shopping and other errands so she wouldn’t be caught by paparazzi. We did notice that Rielle was willing to take the risk of being sighted when she zipped off in her Beemer to a boutique, but she didn’t want to greet the cable repairman at her door. But since this was supposedly a short-term arrangement, we kept our mouths shut.
Other people, however, talked. Within days of Rielle’s arrival in North Carolina, the Enquirer quoted a “friend” of the mistress who explained how the two met and that “sparks flew immediately.”
The tabloid report made Mrs. Edwards furious, and as the senator told me time and again, she screamed and yelled and cried and repeatedly threatened suicide. In the coming months, she would do everything possible to monitor his movements and track his contacts. Her telephone calls and demands for attention would make him late for many campaign appearances. But through it all, he never seemed to grasp the magnitude of the trouble he faced. Instead, he would tell me that if the truth ever came out, it would be, at worst, a one-day news story because “everyone knows” that politicians screw around on their wives. What this position denied was the fact that ƒ thhis wife had cancer and he had sold himself to the American public as a devoted husband and family man who talked about his faith in order to appeal to Christian voters.
The senator’s minimizing may have been a psychological strategy, a way for him to stay calm while heading down the path to self-destruction. I say this because if you look at what he did rather than what he told me, the fear is obvious. Why else would he work so hard to get me to serve as his protector? Almost immediately after the paper reported on Rielle, he issued a statement denying the affair and accusing the paper of fabricating the whole thing. “The story is false,” he said. “It’s completely untrue, ridiculous.” Speaking to reporters, he added that he had been “in love with the same woman for thirty-plus years” and that she remained “loving, beautiful, sexy, and as good a person as I have ever known. So the story’s just false.”
The accusation and denial rippled through the mainstream media but did not build into a wave. In fact, if you got your news from the big papers or TV networks, you probably didn’t know a scandal was rumored. In the blogosphere, however, people feverishly shared insights, information, and gossip in an attempt to piece together the truth. Many bloggers announced that The New York Times was investigating another possible affair between the senator and a woman recently graduated from Duke University. A New York Post item that had been published weeks earlier about a politician visiting the city to see a mistress suddenly made sense. To others, the fact that the Enquirer was owned in part by Clinton backer Roger Altman’s investment company was proof that the charges were pure politics. When her name began to appear in many posts, Rielle gave a statement to Democratic blogger/strategist/consultant Jerome Armstrong: “When working for the Edwards camp, my conduct as well as the conduct of my entire team was completely professional. This concocted story is just dirty politics and I want no part of it.”
Remarkably, the senator’s denial, Rielle’s statement, and our effort to keep her away from reporters and photographers dampened interest in the story advanced by the Enquirer and a few other outlets. From mid-October to mid-December, we heard barely a peep from the press. Political insiders, however, remained alert to the possible scandal and the senator’s vulnerability. First and foremost among them was the senator himself. Every time we spoke, he reminded me that I was his main protector. He wondered aloud whether interest in the story might fade permanently (he hoped so), and he speculated whether Hillary Clinton’s camp might have been behind the Enquirer’s interest in Rielle. After one debate, the senator told me that Mrs. Clinton spoke to him privately to say she was sorry that he was in tabloid hell and to assure him that her campaign had nothing to do with it. Coming from someone he trusted, Hillary’s words would have been reassuring. But he didn’t trust her, and he didn’t believe her.
No ambiguity could be heard in the message Elizabeth Edwards left on my telephone in mid-October, which I saved. Apparently, someone had told her that I had been helping her sister look for a house. (Obviously my inquiries about a rental to accommodate Rielle-whom I had referred to as my sister-got relayed to her in a mixed-up way.) After complaining about this, Elizabeth wƒis,ent on to say, “Do not communicate anything about our family to people. You have no authority. I don’t want you talking to anyone as if you have some position with my family. You do not. And I want you to stop. If I hear about it again, I’m going to see what kind of legal action I can take.”
The threat was unmistakable, and so was the anger in her voice. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the senator had persuaded her that although he had spent one night with Rielle, I had been involved with her for some time. If she believed this fiction, Mrs. Edwards also believed that I was a bigger threat to her husband’s dreams-and her own-than any of his political opponents. All they had worked for, from their personal ambitions to causes such as health care reform and ending the Iraq war, was being undermined by my supposed sexual sins and betrayal. No wonder she hated me.
I wouldn’t have blamed Cheri if she hated me, too. Rielle was a very demanding and self-absorbed person who focused intently on her social life and fashion and had the manners of a teenager. If we prepared a salad for dinner and set it on the counter, she’d come in and start eating it with her hands. If we ran out of bottled water, she expected Cheri to run out for more immediately. To her credit, Cheri was patient about all of this and struggled to be helpful to a woman whose values were almost an affront to her own. Cheri cared about our family and our future, and therefore she worried about the way our lives had become entwined with the life of John Edwards. These concerns motivated her to help Rielle, not any sense of obligation to her as a friend or as someone important to the future of America, which was how Rielle increasingly viewed herself.
The senator and Mrs. Edwards were just about the only sources of conflict in our marriage, but they provided enough trouble to spark frequent arguments. Although I was disillusioned, I was stubborn about my commitment to the senator and to the issues he represented. Ever since 2000, when he was hailed as the future of the Democratic Party, I had operated as if I were helping to make history. Cheri had long since stopped trying to stand against the cause and agreed to follow my lead if possible. But this didn’t mean she was happy about it. In fact, eight years after I started working for a politician, she still didn’t like or trust any of them. And she was furious about the time one particular politician demanded from me. But it was a good time for me. In this period I raised almost $3 million in donations and was paid a percentage of the money I made, which increased my income substantially. It was a long way from the days of the phone banks.
I would have had an easier time persuading Cheri to have a little faith in politicians if the one I worked for hadn’t become so reckless and selfish. These flaws had always been part of his character, along with the small-town insecurity bred in Robbins and the immaturity that comes with being Mama’s favorite boy who could never do anything wrong. But the more people told him he could and should be president and invested their time and money in making it happen, the more pronounced these flaws became. As he was welcomed into the seats of power in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and other places, Edwards came to believe hisƒ to place there was part of the natural order of things. When he told me, “This thing is bigger than any one of us,” he meant that his destiny was practically born in the stars. This status could justify almost anything.
The senator wasn’t the only one who got intoxicated by power. Mrs. Edwards had knowledge of her husband’s affair and understood that if he won the nomination, the Democratic Party and the country could be traumatized if the truth about Rielle came out. She also had the power to demand he drop out, but she did not. Instead, she pressed on with the drive for the White House and became increasingly strident and critical. On November 9, 2007, after she and the senator had finally hired a few more professionals to help the campaign, she sent this blistering e-mail to Joe Trippi (who had helped make Howard Dean a star in 2004), Jonathan Prince, and pollster Harrison Hickman:
The videos I saw (which Kathleen forwarded me, as if it was somehow forbidden for anyone to speak to me directly) were well-shot (with the exception of the set piece that had the dismal background, a visual completely inconsistent with the message) but that is all I can say good about them.
The complaints that followed were numerous. Mrs. Edwards charged Trippi, Prince, and Hickman with “doing a lousy job” and being so focused on undermining one another that they had not developed any coherent advertising strategy. She dubbed them a dysfunctional “white boys’ club,” and her litany of failures criticized the negative content of the material, and bitterly complained about what she presumed was their expenditure of “money John raised (by being away from his family) to focus group that lousy bunch of advertisements… Testing lousy material to see what is the least lousy is hardly the way to run a presidential campaign.” According to Mrs. Edwards, they had “the best candidate in the race with which to work,” but were “producing the worst possible product.” Rather than presenting John Edwards as a “contemplative” or “energetic” candidate, or a “candidate with hope,” she claimed the videos made him look like “[j]ust a sanctimonious bellower.” In a particularly vivid barb, she charged, “You may end up having crapped on one another, but it all sticks to John.” She claimed they hadn’t listened to her in the past, and doubted they would listen to her now. Finally, in closing, she issued the following imperitive: “And Jonathan, you can keep testing me but this is a test I will win. Send it now.”
These last two lines in the message, copies of which went to eight additional staffers, referred to Rielle Hunter’s phone number. For months, Mrs. Edwards had been demanding that Jonathan Prince hand it over, and he had dodged these requests. Eventually, he would be able to tell her that he didn’t have the number, because, in fact, we changed it many times. I thought he was wise to avoid being triangulated between the senator and his wife. Joe Trippi responded this way:
It has been an honor working for you and John. I have done the best I could under the circumstances. But I will step aside. Your email makes it clear to me that I have outlived any usefulness to the campaign. I am sorry for that.
Mrs. Edwards’s outburst had revealed how her dark side was coming to the fore to obscure all of her better qualities. The better parts of John Edwards were as real as his faults, and these gifts-his intelligence, compassion, energy, and courage-had led me, over the years, to invest my future in his success. In that same time I had learned that many, if not most, powerful men operate with the same sense of entitlement shown by the senator.
By the year 2008, Internet outlets had buzzed with rumored affairs involving Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and both John and Cindy McCain, so I thought that all of the viable candidates for president faced potential scandal. Republican rule had been such a disaster for America that I was almost desperate to see a Democrat win, and I believed Edwards had the best shot, especially since he might win a few states in the South that I believed were beyond the reach of the others. This concern, combined with our long-standing relationship, explains why, even after I knew so much about his shortcomings, helping him remained a reflex.
I thought we would get a break from Edwards duty at Thanksgiving. Cheri and I took the kids to her parents’ house in Illinois while Rielle entertained her old roommate from New Jersey, Mimi, and Mimi’s two adolescent sons. Most of the communication I got from her over the holiday was innocuous. Comically, after the turkey feast she sent me a text message that said she was watching the movie Knocked Up and “it’s great.” Two days later, she wrote that her holiday was going well except for the fact that she was “not hearing from him.” I was off duty until Sunday, when I would have to go home to North Carolina to get the Batphone and deposit it in the campaign jet before the senator left on a speaking tour.
Leaving Illinois ahead of my family, I flew into Raleigh and drove to the Montross house. Thinking I was late, I grabbed the phone and raced to the fixed base of operations (FBO) that served the jet Fred Baron had bought to lease to the campaign. The only help I had for this mission would come from a personal assistant (who was paid by the campaign) at the Edwards mansion who was still my friend. She called my cell phone to warn me when they left the house for the airport.
I was relaxed when I reached the FBO because I now thought I had plenty of time. I saw Fred’s plane, which had the tail number N53LB, and I talked my way past the maintenance crew and out to the stairway. Once on board, I could see the plane was dirty and hadn’t been stocked with food, drinks, or periodicals. Realizing something was wrong, I went back down the steps and noticed that one of the two engines had been removed for repair. This jet wasn’t going anywhere.
A quick call to the personal assistaƒersnt brought me the name of a different FBO where Edwards was to board a replacement jet. I talked one of the ground crew into driving me over there in a golf cart. When we reached the plane, I persuaded the pilots to let me board. Here all the skills of bluff and bluster that I had acquired as a political operator came in handy. They had never handled a presidential candidate’s schedule, so I explained that they should always expect an advance man to come for a preflight cabin check. As I walked down the narrow aisle, I slipped the phone into the right seat-back pocket. After giving the pilots a thumbs-up, I emerged from the cabin doorway to see the Edwards caravan approaching. I jumped onto the tarmac, trotted to the golf cart, and left before I got caught. From a distance, I saw Elizabeth outside the plane, kissing her husband good-bye.
They caught me, Andrew! It’s the National Enquirer. They surrounded my car taking pictures. What should I do?”
Rielle was calling from her BMW as she drove away from a supermarket near her obstetrician’s office. She was giddy with excitement, but also a bit worried about what it might mean for the paper to publish photos of her, heavy with child-and possibly not so pretty-running errands just a few miles from the Edwards mansion. She asked me to connect her with the senator, and I did, immediately. When their call was finished, he rang my phone. He sounded both desperate and demanding. “This is bad, Andrew,” he said. “You have to get her under control.”
In a rapid-fire conversation, we reviewed what had happened and concluded that Rielle should come to my house. Before he hung up, the senator asked me if I had any idea how the Enquirer had found Rielle in North Carolina. “Just between us,” he said, “I suspect she’s talking to them. Do you think so?”
I told him, “Hell yes. All she does is talk on her damn phone about you.”
He didn’t want to believe it. He preferred to theorize that the paper had staked out Mimi’s house and followed her by car to the Governors Club at Thanksgiving. Ultimately, it didn’t matter how Rielle had been discovered. All that mattered was the picture they had captured and the fact that the Iowa caucuses were three weeks away. Edwards was neck and neck with Barack Obama for the lead in the polls. (Hillary Clinton was a distant third.) After years of work and a huge investment in cash, the hopes of the millions who saw a bright future in John Edwards might be realized if he won Iowa and received the inevitable rush of donations that could power him through the primaries. Of course now, with the Enquirer guys chasing Rielle as if she were Princess Diana (a thought that both scared and thrilled her), the campaign could be ruined by scandal. After all, as Rielle said, she was “tired of living a lie.”
As far as I could tell, no one followed her to our place, but I had Rielle park in the garage behind the closed door just in case. She came inside grinning and shaking and talking excitedly about how the photographers haƒhotd rushed up to her and barked questions while they took her picture. She was happy to think that she looked cute in her jeans, a flowing black top, Louis Vuitton handbag, and silver shoes. But she was also worried about how the senator might react.
By the end of the evening, after we fed Rielle dinner and Cheri started the roundup for bed, I drove the candidate’s mistress to her house, leaving her car in the garage. It was visible because we had opened the door to walk out. As I arrived back home, I saw that a dark-colored Jeep Liberty (a boxy sport utility vehicle with four doors) had been backed into our driveway. All of its doors were open, and no one was in sight. I stopped my car in a spot where I blocked the Jeep from leaving and walked into the garage. I could hear the kids squealing inside and thought for a moment that some friends must have come to visit. When I opened the door to the house, I saw they were all running around half-naked (it was bedtime), and Brody screamed, “There are two big men looking in the kitchen window!” Cooper and Gracie ran to me and grabbed my legs.
In an instant I figured it was probably the Enquirer guys, which meant they weren’t burglars or rapists. But I still felt we were being threatened, even violated, and I could feel anger rising through me. I called out to Cheri, telling her to take the kids upstairs and get behind a locked door. I went back out to the garage and, before reaching the driveway, grabbed a broom and hit the switch to close the big door.
It was now dark outside, which meant the prowlers would have trouble seeing me. I shouted, “Cheri, where’s our gun?” as if she could hear me and we actually had a gun (we didn’t), and then I pressed the broomstick against the driveway and used my foot to snap it in half. The noise was surprisingly sharp, almost like a gunshot, and in an instant two men came scurrying out of the darkness with their hands up.
One of these fellows was an older British-sounding man. The other was a young American. The Brit tried to explain that he and his colleague were from “the American Media Corporation of Los Angeles,” as if they represented a prestigious company, perhaps the Los Angeles Times. He did not say “the National Enquirer.”
At this point, Cheri came outside. She was shaking with both fear and anger. Above and behind her, the kids peeked out of the second-story windows, pushing apart the blinds so they could get a view of what was going on. I told her to go back inside “and call the sheriff.” Cheri was pleased to turn the tables on these guys with a call to the authorities.
As she retreated, the two men, who couldn’t leave because I had blocked their Jeep, tried to talk me into letting them go. They also pressed me for information about Rielle and the senator. “Why are you covering up for him?” they asked.
I wasn’t bothered by their questions. In that moment, I thought they were scummy guys who had terrified my kids, and I was hoping they would be arrested. But as it turned out, they knew more about the laws on trespass than I did.
The sheriff’s deputy soon explained to me that the local law would allow him to make an arrest only if our property was posted with “No Trespassing” signs (it wasn’t) or if they had been peeping at naked people inside. Since the kids had their pajamas on halfway, we couldn’t claim they were violated. The deputy had to let the two men go, but as he did he made sure to tell them, “If you had come to my house, I would have shot you first and asked questions later. That’s what we do in Chatham County.”
Once the deputy had informed us of the law and I had discovered how the skulking journalists had gotten inside the Governors Club-they had posed as golfers headed for the clubhouse-I moved my vehicle and let them depart. Inside, I apologized to Cheri for being so gruff in the middle of the confrontation. While we talked, the kids hugged us and asked about the men who had been peering in at them and about the deputy who had come to our house with the lights on his cruiser flashing. They were scared, and all we could say was that the men were not supposed to be on our property, they had made a mistake by coming to our house, and the deputy had protected us.
In the next hour, I spoke to the senator several times. He was remarkably calm and absolutely certain that he could control the Enquirer. Determined to stick with his denials about the affair, he decided to confront the editors and publisher with their Clinton connection and argue that going to press with baseless charges would make them look like a tool for his opponents. If this argument failed, he said, he would attack the Enquirer report as “tabloid trash” and offer to sign an affidavit denying that he was Rielle’s lover and the father of her child.
I thought his strategy was wrong. Attacking the paper would only invite more aggressive reporting, and a false affidavit is always a bad idea. I counseled him to wait. Even if the story leaked out, it would take many days, if not weeks, for it to reach a mainstream audience. By then the caucus would be over and we could have a more coherent strategy. Nothing was settled that night, in part because the senator was too busy preparing for the final debate of the Iowa campaign, which was set for the next day in the Des Moines area.
It was almost midnight by the time things got quiet at our…