The Politician

by Young, Andrew

  F

  or 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.) When 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 room. 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.

  R

  ielle 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 enoug
h (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 the 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 his 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 went 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 h
e 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.