John and Elizabeth Edwards held their “farewell and thank-you” party for the people who had worked for, volunteered for, and funded the 2008 campaign in the barn-style gym at their estate, where a stage and sound system had been included in the design for just such an occasion. The crowd numbered about five hundred and included friends, family, donors, staff, and a smattering of celebrities, including basketball coach Dean Smith and actor Danny Glover.
This kind of get-together is a lot like an old-fashioned Irish wake, where people have an opportunity to both celebrate and begin mourning. The comparison seems even more appropriate if you consider that those who idolize and devote themselves to a candidate come to feel that the campaign is like a big family. In this family, John and Elizabeth played the role of mom and dad, and at their party they were so obviously angry with each other that they made all the children nervous.
I’m confident writing about an event I didn’t attend because I received dozens of texts and phone calls from people who did-many came during the party-and they all reported the same thing: The senator mingled easily, thanked people profusely, and gave a brief talk that my friend Tim Toben reported was heartfelt and kind. Toben had once been captivated by John Edwards, but unlike others, he had developed powerful doubts. He said that at the party Elizabeth told several people what a truly bad person I was.
Other friends who attended the farewell told me that the senator and his wife were noticeably cold to each other. They spent most of the night in different corners of the room and rarely came together. When it was time for them to speak, they stood at opposite ends of the stage. The way they related to each other made the members of the “family” feel as if the parents were fighting. If you recall from your own family what that’s like, then you know that the folks the Edwardses were supposed to be thanking felt awkward and uncomfortable. During the campaign, this kind of thing happened far too often, as the candidate and his wife argued while staffers waited and wondered what to do.
Hearing about how Mrs. Edwards had behaved made it easier for me to accept that I didn’t attend the party. I resented being shunned, especially when I thought about all I had done to help the Edwardses build their public lives and the very house where the party was held. And certainly the sacrifices that Cheri, the kids, and I continued to make as political fugitives made me feel angry. But giving up the stress of being around the Edwardses when they were fighting was no sacrifice at all.
As the weeks passed at our Santa Barbara hideaway, Cheri worked especially hard to make our existence normal. With their homeschool teacher coming every day, the kids made spectacular academic progress. We returned to the nightly routine of home-cooked dinners and enrolled the kids in various lessons and activities. Gracie went to a theater program, and Brody played every organized sport available. And at night when we said our prayers, we included blessings for “Fred, and Jaya and her baby” as well as Pepper (the cat) and Mr. Turtle.
In her part of the house, Rielle set up a nursery, lit candles to promote spiritual harmony“iri, and talked on the phone with friends and her adviser Bob. We tried to give her privacy because it’s hard enough by itself to carry around a full-term, about-to-be-born child. She didn’t need us staring at her all the time. The one thing we all did together, without fail, was gather around a TV set to watch the American Idol talent contest every week.
By the middle of February, almost everyone at the house had selected a favorite idol contestant. Rielle and Cooper liked David Archuleta. Cheri and Gracie favored David Cook, and Brody was fond of a pretty young woman named Brooke White. I had trouble settling on just one, so I changed my vote from week to week, which made the debates we had about the talents of the various singers that much more fun.
The Idol show moved from the audition phase to the true competition in mid-February, just as the due date for Rielle’s baby came and went. Feeling ever more uncomfortable, Rielle didn’t move much off the sofa, where she waited for the senator’s calls and scanned the TV news channels for stories about him. On February 17, I got a voice mail from Rielle saying she’d just seen a picture of the Edwardses meeting with Barack Obama, who had gone to Chapel Hill seeking an endorsement. “Johnny and Elizabeth could not be farther apart from each other,” she said, laughing. “I mean, like, they’re on separate sides of the driveway.”
Although she took pleasure in seeing the Edwardses look alienated from each other, Rielle was always pained by the sight of Elizabeth Edwards and frustrated over being unable to contact the senator whenever she wanted to talk. On the night after she saw the “Obama visits Edwards” TV report, Rielle found Cheri’s phone and used it to try to call him at his home. It was eleven P.M. there, and when Mrs. Edwards answered, Rielle hung up without saying a word. The senator’s wife promptly called back and left a message that began in a pleasant tone as she said, “Cheri, I don’t know whether it was you or Andrew who called us. You are welcome to call us anytime you want.” But then, as she got wound up, she became contradictory and scolding. “You have a pretty screwed-up life right now, I understand, with… uh, another child… [pause] and I am willing to talk to you, Cheri, but I don’t want Andrew to call us, and you all can’t be a part of our lives. We are trying to wash our hands of this filth.”
After we heard this message, I called the Batphone, which the senator now kept hidden somewhere in the barn/gymnasium, where he spent most of his days and nights in a form of marital exile. The phone wasn’t set up to receive messages, but every once in a while he would tell Elizabeth he was going to exercise or shoot baskets so that he could check the call history. When I talked to him this time, he told me I needed to control Rielle more closely and to just ignore his wife. We talked politics for a while, and I encouraged him to find something to do that would connect him to his main issue of fighting for the poor and middle class.
“Imagine if instead of Hillary and Barack seeing you at your house, they met you at a Habitat for Humanity work site in New Orleans or even in Greensboro, a few miles away,” I said. “That would have been“wou a better picture.”
He brushed off the suggestion by saying something about how he was going through a difficult time and needed to be home. He then went on to gush about his encounter with Obama. He said he was leaning toward endorsing him, but Elizabeth had been appalled by Obama’s lack of detailed ideas about health care reform. However, the senator was most excited by how his onetime adversary was impressed by the basketball court at the mansion, which is a replica of the floor at UNC, where they traded shots in a game of H-O-R-S-E. (Edwards crowed about how he had won.) Hillary Clinton had already made a similar pilgrimage to Chapel Hill (no H-O-R-S-E), and although Mrs. Edwards wanted her to get the endorsement, he wanted only to endorse the eventual winner. He believed his endorsement was influential enough to determine the winner. He told me he offered it to both Clinton and Obama-first come, first served-in exchange for their commitment to his being named vice president.
Three months would pass before the senator announced his preference for Obama. As he used that time to angle for either the vice presidency or a spot in the cabinet of a future administration, the one Chapel Hill friend who still spoke to me, Tim Toben, became ever more agitated about the man’s audacity.
A decade of being “the good soldier” had reinforced my tendency to be loyal to the extreme. And besides being loyal to the senator, I had been boxed in by Elizabeth Edwards, who had called every person who might have helped me start over in a new job to say that I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief. She spread the rumor that Rielle was just “one of Andrew’s women” and I had delivered her to the senator as if I were a pimp. Under the cloud she had created, beginning when the campaign was still in full swing, only John Edwards was in a position to clear my name and help me start over. The only hope I had was that once his new child arrived, he would be moved to do the right thing.
On February 26, when she was roughly a week overdue, Rielle was scheduled to have her delivery induced. When she was ready to go to the hospital, she came to our side of the house and said, “Let’s take a picture.” She also said, “Will you call him for me, Andrew?”
Our kids knew what was going on and started to run around and shout, “The baby’s coming!” After we shushed them, Cheri went to call Bob McGovern to come with his car, and then she helped Rielle get ready. I tried the senator’s Batphone. When Rielle returned and I told her that he hadn’t answered, she barked, “Call Fred!” but then caught herself and said, “Sorry, Andrew. I’m a little emotional right now.” Fred did answer and spoke to Rielle, wishing her good luck.
When Bob arrived we took a few pictures and gave her a hug, and Rielle left for the hospital with him. About twenty minutes later, Edwards called me. I had trouble hearing because of the kids. He was abrupt and sounded irritated.
“Hey, what’s up?” he said.
I was in a good mood and said, joking, “The eagle is about to land.”
“What?”
“Just kidding. She is on the way to the hospital and wanted to talk to you. Hold on, I will patch you through.”
As I removed the phone from my ear to hit the buttons, I heard him raise his voice: “Andrew… Andrew, don’t patch me through!”
I put the phone back to my ear and said, “What?”
“I don’t want you to patch me through. Just tell her I couldn’t talk because of Elizabeth and I will call you later. Tell her I am thinking of her.”
“Senator, you have to talk to her. She will freak out if you don’t.” Pause. “Boss, you have to. Just for a minute.” He insisted it was a bad time and he would call back later. I didn’t hear from him all night.
While I talked to the senator, Bob McGovern delivered Rielle to Cottage Hospital in downtown Santa Barbara. In a photo taken before they went inside, Bob has his arm around Rielle. She’s wearing a white turtleneck that doesn’t quite cover her enormous belly and has her signature pink scarf looped around her neck. Over their heads, a sign announces, EMERGENCY TRAUMA CENTER.
At the admissions desk, Rielle signed in under the name Jaya James and let them run one of our credit cards to pay the bill. (Yes, the mother of John Edwards’s baby did not have health insurance.) The initial authorization was for five thousand dollars. When they went to the obstetrics ward, Bob blessed the room (“cleared the energy,” in Rielle’s words).
Rielle labored all night, but her cervix never dilated. Cheri was there at a little before nine A.M. on Wednesday, February 27, when Rielle agreed to a cesarean section, and a baby girl came into the world. She was twenty-one and a half inches long, weighed eight pounds one ounce, and had blue eyes and a full head of brown hair like her father. Although the baby scored high on the scale they use to assess neonatal health, she had had her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck during the labor and her heart rate was a little fast, which caused some concern among the professionals in the delivery room. After letting Rielle visit with her briefly, they transferred the baby to an intensive care unit for observation. Cheri and Bob followed the baby to the ICU, where the nurses, assuming Bob was the father, made sure he got to hold her first.
Fortunately, the baby’s heartbeat normalized quickly, and she was soon reunited with her mom. In a photo taken during this“ken reunion, Rielle looks peaceful and relaxed as the baby rests on her chest. The picture also shows that Rielle is wearing the long heavy gold chain that Bunny Mellon gave Senator Edwards as a good-luck charm.
When I got the news about the baby, I called and texted the senator again. I then called Fred. About an hour later, Edwards called me and I was short with him. “You need to call her. Let me give you Cheri’s cell. Be sweet-Rielle is very scared right now.” He gave me a vague assurance that he would call her, and I asked him if he wanted me to send her flowers from him.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” He paused. “But don’t sign it from me. Someone might see it.”
In this moment, I felt as though a switch had turned in my heart. After watching and hearing John Edwards practice a thousand little deceptions and tell a thousand different lies, ostensibly in the service of some greater good, I finally recognized that he didn’t care about anyone other than himself. A precious living, breathing human being-his daughter-had come into the world, and he wasn’t inclined to even call the woman who had given birth to her. Instead, I had to prompt him to do the right thing, to do the most basic, human thing. My faith in him died almost instantly, and I felt both ashamed of my naïveté and very afraid for the future of my family.
The senator eventually did call Rielle at the hospital, and Cheri told me that she seemed happy about what he had told her. I knew that he had merely played the role of the concerned father, transforming himself for the few minutes that he had to spend on the phone with Rielle and then dropping the pose as soon as he hung up. I knew he had this chameleon ability, and I no longer considered it a talent or a tool. I saw it as a symptom of something deeply flawed in the man, and it disturbed me to think about how he had used this ability to fool me and others so many times. It had taken me almost ten years to figure out the truth about the senator. Rielle had known him for only two years, and when they spoke she was drugged with painkillers and flooded with the feel-good endorphins that come with labor. She believed him.
Because she’d had a cesarean, Rielle stayed in the hospital for five days. During this time, Cheri offered her expertise as a nurse to help her adjust to breast-feeding and learn all the other duties that come with a newborn. (Despite her years of experience with new moms, Cheri was a little taken aback when Rielle asked when she could resume having sex.) When Rielle and the baby were ready to be discharged, Cheri and Bob were there to help her. Cheri brought along a baby’s shirt that Rielle had asked our kids to decorate with the logo “I Am the Granddaughter of a Millworker.” Rielle wrapped the shirt around her baby, whom she had named Frances Quinn, for the journey home. (She chose Quinn, a derivation of the Latin word for “five,” because she was Edwards’s fifth child.)
The hospital’s final bill was paid with our credit card, and Rielle signed out under the name Rielle Jaya James Druck. The space for “father” on the child’s birth certificate was left blank. Bob drove mother and child to Montecito and through the gate at Ennisbrook and the“isbn to the house.
Within an hour of Rielle’s arrival at the house, I could see that she was not going to have an ordinary relationship with her child. I had witnessed the bond Cheri made with each of our children and watched other new moms with their infants, so I knew the attachment could be fierce. But Rielle believed, as she said, that the baby had been “sent to save the world.” Accordingly, she just couldn’t let anyone else hold her. In fact, in her first few days at the house with the baby, Rielle almost never put her down. With the slightest cry or snuffle, she would pick up the baby, coo something like “You are just soooo beautiful!” and try to nurse her.
In more relaxed moments, Rielle would do a funny imitation of Barack Obama’s famous campaign line “Fired up, ready to go.” Before it became annoying, it was actually heartwarming to see a mother with her baby, chanting, “Fired up! Ready to go! Fired up! Ready to go!” as the baby’s eyes widened and focused on her face. Unfortunately, Rielle’s positive spirit was reserved entirely for Frances Quinn. With us, she was irritated and impatient. She couldn’t bear the slightest noise from our kids and would try to get them to be quiet even when they were playing outside.
When Bob visited we had a few private minutes with him, and he tried to explain Rielle’s demanding and needy nature. He said that Rielle had suffered terribly as a child. With Frances Quinn, he said, “she’s trying to fill the void inside her.” Knowing that her father had been involved in an insurance fraud scheme and actually killed his own daughter’s beloved prizewinning horse, we found it easy to believe she carried deep psychological wounds. But although this information helped us have compassion for Rielle, it didn’t make living with her any easier. After a couple of days, we decided to go to North Carolina and check on our house, which was now months into construction. Rielle invited an old friend named Wendy to come up from Los Angeles and keep her company while we took a risk and flew back to Raleigh-Durham. (We left the kids with Cheri’s parents as we traveled.) I hadn’t been home since December.
At the construction site, we were able to see what the builder had done. Because we were forced to make decisions by phone, guided by our architect, the house had gotten much bigger and more expensive than we had planned. During the visit we offered whatever suggestions we could for bringing the project under control, but we could hardly blame the builder, because we had told him to do what he thought was best. “Best” in any contractor’s mind is going to be big and expensive, and in the world we now inhabited, which included private jets, Aspen vacation homes, and Santa Barbara rentals that cost twenty thousand dollars per month, a thousand dollars this way or that way didn’t seem to matter.
When we weren’t at the building site we were at the Montross house, which hadn’t yet sold. We went through piles of mail and a stack of notes left by reporters and photographers. We didn’t respond to any of them but brought the notes with us as we traveled back to California. We didn’t know when we would ever get to North Carolina again.
In Santa “omaBarbara, we discovered that Rielle had just about driven her friend Wendy crazy with demands and criticisms. (Wendy actually broke down crying as she talked to us about the experience.) Rielle also had been calling Senator Edwards’s phone several times a day and was threatening both him and Fred Baron with going public about the affair and the baby. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for anything to make Rielle more difficult to deal with, but motherhood had in fact given her an even greater sense of her own power and a willingness to use it.
One seemingly small incident from this period illustrates the point perfectly. After calling Cheri for a cup of coffee, Rielle let it sit for a moment and then summoned her back because she needed more sugar put in it. Cheri got her what she requested and left, only to receive another phone call from Rielle. The coffee now needed more milk. Cheri added milk, but now it was too cold. “Put it in the microwave,” said Rielle. A mother, nurse, and wife who was accustomed to caretaking, Cheri actually did this chore, but she was obviously unhappy and said something sarcastic about how Rielle must have been especially tired.
Soon Cheri and I were both fit to be tied as life with Rielle became more difficult and weeks passed without any sign of the senator telling the truth or any suggestion of a long-term resolution of this crazy mission. Communication with him was becoming more difficult. Where he once called several times a day, he now never dialed my number. When I got through to him, he kept the calls brief and guarded what he said. In the middle of March, I was shocked to hear that he had booked himself onto The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and that after the taping he was going to visit Rielle and the baby at a hotel in Beverly Hills.
Rielle told us of this plan with both excitement and anxiety in her voice. The meeting was set for March 19, which was about ten days away, and she was self-conscious about her physical condition. She instantly began fasting and exercising madly. (I’ll never forget how she chanted along with special recordings of Buddhist monks that she listened to as she worked out on the treadmill. The sound of the chants, with Rielle joining in, echoed through the house.) Rielle was also worried about how to relate to John Edwards now that she was the mother of his child and their relationship was more complicated. Cheri, who was overloaded with the stress of Rielle’s demands, responded to this concern with one of her rare (considering the circumstances) displays of hostility.
“Well, of course you are worried,” she said. “Your whole relationship has been about nothing other than hanging out in hotel rooms, drinking, and having sex.” This time Rielle would get the hotel room, Cheri allowed, but since she was nursing, alcohol was out, and it was a little too soon for her to engage in much sexual activity.
As snarky attacks go, Cheri’s little commentary was fairly mild, and Rielle didn’t react. On March 18, Bob came to pick her up for the drive to Los Angeles, where they would stay in two of the more expensive suites available at the famous Beverly Hilton Hotel. I received text messages from Rielle that referred to the senator and his new daughter. The most telling one arrived at 1:39 A.M.: “Yeah he is burping Quinn going to sleep when “ tohe is done. Soooo tired.”
The next night, I watched on television as the senator walked onto the Leno set, shook hands with the genial host, and answered questions. Like everyone, Leno was most interested in whether he had made an endorsement decision. The senator said Hillary Clinton was the choice he’d make with his head, but Barack Obama might be the candidate chosen by his heart. When asked if he might try one more time for the White House, he said, “I’m not thinking about running again. But never say never.”
It was mind-boggling to me that the senator was able to take the stage in such a relaxed manner and discuss national political affairs with such a sense of his own power, knowing that he could be brought down in an instant by a mistress lounging in a hotel across town with his newborn baby. Worse still, he was sitting on the same sofa he had shared with Elizabeth just months earlier, when they spoke lovingly of their thirtieth anniversary.
Cheri had had enough of Rielle, John Edwards, Elizabeth Edwards, and the freakish existence we had accepted and now seemed to be trapped inside. She wanted our life back, and so did I. But I had signed for the $20,000-per-month lease on the Santa Barbara house, and my income was tied to John Edwards. Every time I talked to Fred Baron about ending the charade and helping us get back to a normal life, he said, “Don’t worry about it, we’re going to take care of you. We need to focus on getting him the vice presidency.” When I tried to call and text the senator myself, he refused to answer the phone or respond to my messages. He had no problem responding to Rielle, however, and called her half a dozen times a day. Once when I answered her phone when he called, he responded with cold indifference to my pleas for him to come clean and changed the subject by accusing my wife of talking to bloggers who were speculating on the Internet about Edwards’s connection to Rielle.
I could barely contain my anger. “Rielle tells everyone she knows about you. We haven’t even told our families. What the…?” I shouted at him. I let him know that she had told her friends Mimi and Wendy everything about him, and when she talked to her friend Pigeon O’Brien in St. Louis, they laughingly referred to him as “Love Lips.” Our families still weren’t sure why we had disappeared, and our kids were beginning to forget their lives back in North Carolina. Senator Edwards didn’t seem to care about our distress, but he did ask if I could get a diaper to send for a DNA test. He still didn’t believe he was the baby’s father.
When the call was over, it was clear to me that I would have to take some action to solve our problems. I still heard from a few people who were connected with the campaigns and refused to judge me harshly. One of these friends actually gave my name to a prominent attorney in Tampa who had started a national nonprofit organization to help disabled people. Blinded in an accident when he was a teenager, Richard Salem called this group Enable America. Its goal was to help people with various disabilities gain access to employment. The project had stalled for lack of donations, and my “atitrack record as a fund-raiser got his attention. After he reviewed my history and we spoke several times on the phone, he flew Cheri and me to Tampa for an interview.
My first contacts with Richard Salem had restored my sense of confidence and given me some hope for the future. After a night in a hotel, where we talked about living in Tampa and decided it would be okay, Cheri and I went to meet him. We had breakfast at a restaurant that was high up in one of the city’s tallest buildings, and I thought an offer was pending. Toward the end of the breakfast Salem motioned to his assistant, who began riffling through her briefcase. While the assistant continued her search, Salem said, “Andrew, I want to tell you about a case in which I represented a Mob boss.” He proceeded to explain how he was up front with the jury about his client’s crime connections because “you should never ignore the elephant in the room.” His aide then handed over copies of National Enquirer articles about me, Rielle, and the senator. This was my elephant, said Richard Salem, and he couldn’t ignore it.
Unable to defend myself without the risk of blowing the entire cover-up, I thought the fact that I was sitting there with my wife showed the story was false. I said, “I would hope people would see what’s been printed and look at us together and know what is true.”
Although he obviously couldn’t “see” us, I know that Richard Salem could hear the strength of Cheri’s support for me when we had talked about the job and moving our family to Florida. Nevertheless, after recruiting me quite aggressively, he told me I could not have the job. We went home feeling ashamed and angry. When we got back to Santa Barbara, nothing had changed with Rielle. She was still extremely needy and so focused on her baby that she hardly ever left her alone to sleep. I never actually held Frances Quinn, and Rielle let Cheri, who had years of neonatal intensive care experience, handle her only a few times. She was happy to let us do chores for her, however, and would call us on the telephone when we were just two or three rooms away to help her with a task.
When we resisted her, Rielle became petulant but also tried to handle a few things on her own. On one morning she actually put coffee in the coffeemaker, filled it with water, and switched it on to brew. When she returned, she found that she had missed something in the setup and both coffee and grounds had flowed out of the machine, over the counter, and onto the floor. She saw the mess, made a fresh pot of coffee so she would have something to drink, but decided against cleaning up. A little later in the morning, Cheri wandered into the kitchen, where the countertop and floor (both made of limestone, which was easily stained) were still wet with Rielle’s mess. She came back to our side of the house, where I was on the treadmill.
“I’ve had it,” she said, flushing with anger. “I’ve really had it.”
After Cheri told me what happened, I went with her to Rielle’s side of the house. We found her in her bedroom, where several candles were lit and she was chanting some incantations to the baby. Cheri said, “Are you going to clean up the mess in the kitchen?”
No answer from Rielle.
“Do you expect me to clean it up?”
No answer from Rielle.
I thought Cheri was going to explode as she told Rielle that she was a capable adult and responsible for cleaning up her own messes. Rielle then held up her hand, like a cop stopping traffic, and said, “I’m not talking to you.” Then she added, “You know, Cheri, you’re not very smart, but you are perceptive.”
I got Cheri out of there before things deteriorated even further, but there was nothing I could do to change her mind about what was going to happen next. She said that either Fred Baron was going to move Rielle out of the house “or I’ll move her out.” That day, Fred invited us to visit him in Dallas to talk things over.
Leaving Rielle alone in the great big house in Montecito, we took the kids to Illinois to be with Cheri’s parents. After telling them only that we were trying to get our lives back to normal and needed their help with the kids, we flew to see Fred in Dallas. We landed at Love Field and got to his house in a town car he had sent to deliver us.
Fred lived in a compound carved out of about a dozen acres, including an artificial lake, within minutes of the airport. The house he built just for his domestic staff would have been one of the most impressive mansions in Chapel Hill. His own home resembled a grand château in France. (It was where he hosted his famous Christmas parties, where as many as one thousand guests would take in entertainment from the likes of the Doobie Brothers and Three Dog Night.) Determined to give us a tour, he showed us the enormous reception area by the front door, big first-floor rooms for public events, and a private library where he kept a valuable oil portrait of George Washington.
Someone else would have shown us around the house with the sense that he was flexing his muscles a bit, impressing us with his wealth and power. Fred just seemed thrilled by life, amazed that he was as rich as he was, and excited to show us how he lived (you couldn’t help but like Fred). When we finally sat down to talk, we were joined by his wife, Lisa Blue, who was a lawyer and held a doctorate in psychology. Cheri kicked off her shoes and put her feet on the coffee table to show that she was not at all intimidated. Together, we then made three demands:
1. We wanted to know why John Edwards hadn’t yet told the truth.
2. We wanted to separate from Rielle and her child.
3. We wanted a long-term plan for our future and a commitment to see it through. Specifically, we wanted to know if Edwards was going to establish the antipoverty foundation that was supposed to supply me with a long-term job and health insurance.
Fred said he understood our worries but that we should have confidence in him and the senator. Although I had tried to tell him the truth, he still believed I was the father of Rielle’s baby, and he expected that Edwards would be a big player in the next administration. “Hold on until August,” he said, referring to the Democratic National Convention. Lisa and Fred both said they felt (and Lisa is a trained psychologist) that Elizabeth was a threat to us, our kids, and herself. Repeating an argument he had begun to make with me several weeks before, Fred also said we had no special ties to Chapel Hill and could settle anywhere in the country. He said we should finish the house, sell it, and start a new life far from the prying eyes of the press. Fred soon wired several hundred thousand dollars to our builder to help with all our expenses. He offered this as a gift.
Talk as they might, Lisa and Fred couldn’t persuade us that we should stick it out with Rielle in Santa Barbara until August, when somehow everything would be resolved. We knew John and Elizabeth Edwards better than they did. We also knew the truth. Empowered by what we knew, I insisted that John Edwards call me and that we meet, face-to-face, as soon as possible.
Uh, hey, stranger! It’s John. I hope you are doing well… Just calling ’cause I miss you. I haven’t talked to you in a while. I wanted to see how you are doing. Umm, you can call me back on this phone… Anyway, hope you are doing well. I miss talking to you, Andrew. We’ll see you, pal.
The message was recorded on my cell phone account on May 21, 2008. The tone was contrite, and it came as a signal that Edwards was ready at last to deal with me. For months the senator had neglected not just me, but others, and he’d used as an excuse the claim that he was carefully deliberating over whom to endorse for the party’s nomination. It was a ridiculous claim, but still he used it to manipulate people who had been very good to him, including Bunny Mellon, who had sent word that she wanted to visit with him. Bunny needed his support, because her bedridden daughter, Eliza, was deteriorating rapidly. When she died in mid-May, the senator skipped the funeral, saying he was still considering his endorsement. As far as I knew, the only thing Bunny had ever asked of him-in return for more than $6 million-was that he sit on one side of her at that funeral while Caroline Kennedy sat on the other. Caroline fulfilled her wish. John Edwards did not.
Truer to his promises and responsibilities, Fred Baron located a house for Rielle and arranged to have her moved into it in early June. Cheri went out to run errands on the day she left. The kids and I actually helped her pack and took pictures wi“ookth her as she said good-bye. Although no one said it, I knew that I would never see Rielle again or speak to her on the phone. She did not say thank you.
Fred also kept hounding the senator until he at last agreed to meet me face-to-face, so that I could tell him how I felt and press him to make things right. I was furious about how my family and I were being treated. Cheri and I sensed that the senator was telling Mrs. Edwards tales about me and that she was getting more upset. On Father’s Day, June 15, Cheri got an e-mail that appeared to come from Heather North, the nanny at the Edwards house. It read:
Has Rielle had Andrew’s baby yet? She is such a scum. I can’t believe she slept with Andrew the first night she met him. Has she really been around since August 2006? You must be sick of her. I am so sorry. She flirted with Jed that first night too, even when I was right there.:(… I am so sorry about the rumors that Andrew has had lots of affairs like this one… What a bad time this must be for you.
Although it arrived with Heather’s return address, nothing in this e-mail sounded like her, and Cheri called her as soon as it arrived. Heather answered, sounding very happy that we had called, and explained that she was out on a boat.
“Then you didn’t send me an e-mail?” asked Cheri.
“No, why do you ask?”
It took less than thirty seconds for the two women to agree that Elizabeth Edwards was the only person who could have had access to Heather’s e-mail account and the interest in sending the e-mail in question. The tone of the message and a word like “scum” were so out of character for Heather-but consistent with the attitudes of Mrs. Edwards-and only reinforced the suspicion that she was the source. The incident bothered Heather, because of the invasion of her account, but made us feel sorry for Elizabeth Edwards. She had cancer. She and her husband had just finished a grueling and failed campaign for president. And I believe that deep in her heart, she knew her husband was the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby and that her campaign against me was unfair and dishonest.
When Edwards finally set a date to meet me for a discussion that I intended to use to force an end to his deception, he insisted I come alone and asked that we meet in a restaurant. I agreed to leave Cheri home but demanded we get together in private. There was no way we could settle this in a public place. He agreed, and we settled on a date, Wednesday, June 18, and a place: the River Inn in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C. I bought a plane ticket and was ready to depart on June 17 when Edwards sent word that he needed to delay our meeting for a day in order to attend the funeral of Meet the Press host Tim Russert, who had died unexpectedly. Despite the cost and inconvenience, I rescheduled my flight and arrived in D.C. on Thursd“ D.ay morning. (Only later would I learn that Edwards never went to the funeral.) Pam Marple, the attorney who wrote the statement declaring that I was Rielle Hunter’s lover, picked me up at the airport and drove me to the hotel, where I sat in the lobby.
The plan called for the senator to ring my cell phone and tell me the room number where I was to find him. Ninety minutes after the appointed time, I started leaving messages on Fred’s phone. When he called me back, he said, “He is about to call you. Calm down. Let’s get this taken care of.”
I called Cheri and told her it was finally about to happen. While I was talking to her, I saw one of the senator’s latest body men, Matthew Nelson, walk out of the elevator. “Hey, Cheri, I gotta go,” I said, and got up to speak to him. He was shocked to see me but tried to act nonchalant.
“What are you doing here?”
I told him I was visiting some friends and then asked him why he was in town. Matthew said he was there with the senator, who had just filled in for Obama at an event and gotten a five-minute standing ovation for his speech. He said Edwards believed he was going to get “V.P.” (This was not idle speculation. Tim Toben had relayed to me Edwards’s inside knowledge of polls that showed he would help Obama capture more votes in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania than any other running mate.)
Just then my cell phone rang. I answered to hear Edwards’s familiar voice asking me to come upstairs. I said okay and then dialed Cheri for encouragement. She said, “Try to stay calm. And whatever you do, don’t hit him!”
On the elevator ride up I seethed and I thought about how only a consummate actor, or a psychologically disturbed human being, could have greeted me so cheerfully knowing what was about to happen. On the fifth floor I got out of the elevator and turned right to find the suite where he was waiting. I knocked and he answered with a Cheshire- cat grin and said how glad he was to see me. I responded that I wished I could say the same.
He led me into the suite and sat down with his legs folded up on the chair in a very casual way and acted like he was shocked to see me upset. He tried to talk about how he had just given an incredible speech and was certain to be picked to run as vice president. I cut him off, saying I had run into Matthew downstairs. For a moment he seemed troubled by this but then said he didn’t care because Matthew was loyal to him, not Elizabeth.
He said he didn’t know why I had come to see him and suggested I start the conversation. I began by asking why the “fuck” he hadn’t called me in three months. I criticized him for missing Eliza’s funeral and failing to call people whom he had promised to contact on my behalf.
After trying to minimize my complaints, he then tried to soothe my feelings. He asked why I was upset and told me he loved me. He insisted that our relationship was unch“onsanged and that he hadn’t been in touch with anyone because he was depressed about the election.
I exploded. I asked how many people did the shit for him that my family had done. I told him he owed us a call. And that it was inexcusable that he had skipped Eliza’s funeral. Bunny truly loved him, had given him millions of dollars and never asked anything else from him in return.
Backpedaling, he said that Bunny had assured him that she was not upset about the funeral. I corrected him, saying that Bunny was too dignified to complain, or say how much he had hurt her.
I hit a nerve. He put up his hands and talked about how we had been friends for years, had been through so much together, and that nothing had changed between us for him. He then used one of his old tricks, blaming someone else for his problems and trying to bond with me over marital problems. He said he knew Cheri was upset with me and that he understood what it felt like because Elizabeth was being hard on him.
Exasperated, I looked at him with fury in my eyes and said, “Jesus Christ.”
He told me that Elizabeth screamed all the time about me to him, and that he actually defended me. Edwards said that his wife believed that I had ruined the presidential campaign and their reputation. I told him of course she thinks that-he told her all that. He insisted, “I am going through hell.”
He was veering way off the main topic I wanted to discuss and I tried to bring him back in line by recalling that he had abandoned me, and my family. He denied this and said he wasn’t the kind of person to abandon someone he cared deeply about.
“Not that kind of person? Not that kind of person?” I then started to name people he had betrayed or abandoned without cause, including Elizabeth, Julianna Smoot, Josh Stein, David Axelrod, Bunny Mellon, John Kerry, Josh Brumberger, and others. Before I could finish, he lost his cool. He jumped up and slammed his fist down on the table. “No one fucking talks to me like that. No one.” When he ripped into Cheri, accusing her of talking to the press and others about Rielle and the baby, I shouted, “Bullshit!” right in his face.
He asked what the “fuck” I wanted.
I said, “Nothing,” and stood up. Our faces were about a foot apart over the coffee table and I was ready to fight him right there. He told me to get the “fuck” out. I told him he could read about it in the newspapers.
I flung open the door and it hit the wall with a loud bang. I walked down to the elevator trying to make a dramatic exit. I could feel him nervously looking at me as I pushed the call button. As I waited for the elevator, some of the drama drained out of the moment. Finally he walked down the hall and asked me to come back.
Afraid to leave things as they were, I went back to the room. In the tense first moments, he told me not to threaten him again. I told him not to “fucking” talk to me like that again.
We then had a much calmer discussion. He promised to stay in contact with me and not delay returning my calls. He also renewed his promise to help me in the long term by establishing the antipoverty organization with funds from Bunny Mellon where I would have a good job with health insurance and he could have a solid political platform.
Within twenty-four hours of our confrontation at the hotel in Georgetown, he went to see Bunny. During this visit he decided that he was setting his sights too low. Instead of $3 to $5 million, he now hoped to get as much as $50 million and her jet so he could circle the globe combating poverty. As a few more weeks passed, he had me contact her accountant, Kenneth Starr (not the same fellow who was involved in the Monica Lewinsky case), to see if the foundation was feasible. The senator and I discussed strategy in five different phone conversations. Following his plan, I created a nonprofit corporation for this project, which we called the New Heritage Education Foundation. I broached the topic with Starr, who thought a worldwide antipoverty effort headed by Bunny’s friend John Edwards would be an ideal way to honor her life.
Once he realized that this foundation could become a reality and provide him with a permanent role on the world stage, the senator pursued it with enthusiasm. After one meeting with Bunny, the senator told Bunny’s friend Bryan Huffman he could be on the board of the foundation and “do great things.” He then called me and left a voice mail saying, “Bunny loves me.” Another message he left me said:
Andrew, hey, it’s John. I had a wonderful conversation with…
This call, and another voice mail in which he told me he was going to see Bunny to finalize arrangements for the foundation, gave me hope that the senator was finding a way to fulfill his promise that I would be employed into the future. I was also happy to be talking about something other than a secret girlfriend and his unacknowledged child. I shouldn’t have been so happy. Without someone to monitor them and clean up after them, Rielle and the senator wouldn’t be able to stay out of trouble for more than a few weeks.