I also noticed a number of videotapes, including one marked “Special,” which had the tape pulled out and seemed intentionally broken. Cheri said, “Must be the missing webisodes Elizabeth was looking for.”
I couldn’t resist. With scissors, a pen, and some Scotch tape, I fixed the cassette and put a TV on top of some boxes to watch the video. As soon as I pressed play, we saw an image of a man—John Edwards—and a naked pregnant woman, photographed from the navel down, engaged in a sexual encounter. The images were recorded with the somewhat steady assurance of a professional, and the senator’s performance was ironically narcissistic. The video was without sound, and the angle was such that the woman’s face was obscured. (She obviously held the camera.) But given where we found the tape and the fact that the woman on the tape wore a distinctive bracelet I had seen on Rielle many times, it was safe to assume it was Rielle, and that it was filmed just before the election began.
As compromising images of a former presidential candidate and current contender for vice president flashed on the screen, Cheri and I dropped to the floor and watched, speechless. When we were able to talk, we debated turning it off, but neither of us could actually press the button. It was like watching a traffic pileup occur in slow motion—it was repelling but also transfixing. We also knew immediately that we now possessed something powerful. We weren’t going to use it in any nefarious way, but I planned to deposit a copy in a safe-deposit box and place at least one other with an attorney with instructions to make it public, if necessary, should anything suspicious befall us.
My fear may have been fueled by paranoia. However, it was justified. I had been uprooted and then isolated from friends, and I had read enough John Grisham novels to believe that superlawyers empowered with endless amounts of money could do terrible things. We were dealing with lots of rich and powerful people. The tape, I thought, might protect us.
We returned to California via Illinois, arriving on July 21. After seven months of being trapped with Rielle, we felt like celebrating. We used a credit left over from a hotel to stay overnight at Venice Beach, where the kids got to see Rollerbladers, fortune-tellers, and a few “You’re going to hell” evangelists on the boardwalk. In the morning, we drove back to Santa Barbara so we could close up that house. I turned off my cell phone and rolled down the windows to enjoy our last drive up the coast. When I switched the phone on again at the house, it rang almost immediately.
Pam Marple, the attorney who had drafted the statement declaring I was the father of Rielle’s baby, was calling from her office in Washington. She said someone from the National Enquirer had just called her asking for a comment on pictures they had showing John Edwards visiting Rielle Hunter—less than twelve hours ago—at the Beverly Hilton. A story on Edwards going to the hotel and speculating about the nature of the visit was already posted on the Enquirer Web site. Pam was upset and hoped I could tell her something about what was really going on. In fact, I didn’t know that Edwards had been in Beverly Hills while we were a few miles away at Venice Beach. I couldn’t advise her, nor could I inform her.
At first I thought they had pictures from the senator’s first visit with Rielle and the baby. She had taken photos of him with Quinn, and I thought that she may have given them to the Enquirer. Knowing that the senator could be in deep trouble, I wanted to help him, even after all that had happened. I tried to call Rielle but got no answer. As I hung up, the phone rang in my hand. It was the senator. I answered to hear him fighting tears and struggling to talk.
“Andrew, they caught me. It’s all over.”
The emotion in his voice and traffic in the background made it hard for me to hear him. I let him cry and blubber for a minute, and as he did I thought I heard a man who was finally facing the truth. I felt I needed to help him pull himself together. I started by going to my computer and logging on to the Enquirer Web site while I asked him what had happened.
According to the tale he told me, the senator had come to Los Angeles to see supporters and had arranged to see Rielle and Frances Quinn afterward. Bob picked him up in his BMW and drove him to the Beverly Hilton, where Rielle and Bob were staying.
“Did you see any cameras?” I asked him.
“No, definitely not. I mean, I guess there could have been one—I remember a room service cart—I guess a camera could have been there. Hell, they can hide a camera anywhere these days.”
“Well, they say in the article that y’all went out walking holding hands.”
“No, that’s BS. We didn’t leave the room.”
My guess was that Rielle had tortured the hotel staff in order to get an upgrade and was not in the room where the Enquirer guys had set up their stakeout. A glance at the Enquirer Web site turned up no actual photos of Edwards with Rielle or the baby. They only had pictures of him in public areas of the hotel. “I don’t think they’ve got what they say they have,” I told him. Then I asked, “What are you going to tell Elizabeth?”
“I already talked to her. I had to.”
Now a bit calmer, Edwards explained that he had been so alarmed by the encounter with the Enquirer guys that he felt he had to call his wife. But as usual, he didn’t tell her the truth. He told her that Bob and Rielle were blackmailing him. He went to the hotel because they were going to tell the world an enormous lie—John Edwards is the father of this baby—and he had to give them money or else. He also told Elizabeth that I wasn’t paying child support.
The story might have been logical if he had told Mrs. Edwards that I was part of the blackmailing scheme, but he had not. “It doesn’t make sense for you to be alone in a hotel room with my girlfriend for three hours, until two A.M.,” I said. “It’s stupid.”
A call waiting signal interrupted our conversation, and Edwards told me he had to go to Los Angeles International Airport to catch a flight home. He sounded a little like a man headed to the gallows or a little boy going to see his mother after he broke a window playing ball. He said he would call me from the airport. When I hung up and checked the message on my phone, I discovered it was Fred Baron. He sounded full of life as he almost shouted, “Hey, I’m out of the hospital and feeling great. I’m gonna beat this thing!”
Fred, whose cancer was progressing, told me he had recently spent several days at the Mayo Clinic undergoing treatment. He sounded so cheerful, I thought that he must not know what was happening with John Edwards. When I called back and informed him, he finally believed my insistent claim, which I had expressed to him for months, that I was not the father of Rielle’s baby. He accepted that I had never had an affair with her and that I had been protecting his friend the senator all along.
Fred was very upset. I could hear him telling Lisa Blue the news and saying, “Goddamn Edwards. What the hell was he thinking?”
Fred and I spoke nine times in the next few hours. He was devastated to learn the truth about a man he had trusted with his time, emotion, and fortune. Like someone who has been through a terrible trauma, Fred wanted to pore over the details. At one point we discussed the fact that Edwards had asked us both to see if we could get a fabricated DNA test showing he was not the baby’s father. Fred laughed and said, “That’s criminal. That’s ridiculous. And it’s not going to happen.” When we talked about how the Enquirer staff could have known that Edwards was going to be at the hotel, we had to conclude that they had been tipped off by Rielle, Bob McGovern, or someone either of them had told. In the end it didn’t matter, but it was natural to speculate. (The details in the Enquirer were mostly accurate, including some facts I wouldn’t confirm until much later.)
The senator called me from the airport and continued the conversation we had started earlier. We talked a total of seven different times during the day.
When Cheri and I talked about what was going on, she instantly thought of Mrs. Edwards and how she might react. According to her husband and Fred Baron, she had threatened to hurt herself many times before. Genuinely concerned for her and her children, we decided it wou
ld be best to contact their old family friend David Kirby and suggest someone check on her condition. Kirby agreed and made sure someone did. The next day, I got the following voice mail from Elizabeth Edwards, who was speaking about Rielle:
If you want to be helpful to me you can not call a bunch of people, you can call the mother of your child and pay what you owe . . . This is a completely crazy, desperate, pathetic woman with no skills and no possibility of employment. You are going to have to take care of your baby. If you do that, she won’t behave in this erratic way [long pause]. And then you and your concubine and your entire family can stay out of our lives.
Cheri had predicted that one person was absolutely certain to believe the cockamamie story Edwards had devised about the blackmail scheme: his wife. She was right, and the message proved it. Considering what Elizabeth Edwards believed was true, the anger that she directed at me was understandable, but I couldn’t excuse her decision to direct some of her fury at Cheri. On the same day she used voice mail to lecture me, she called Cheri’s number and said in a fake, syrupy drawl: “Andrew needs to pay for that baby!”
In the days that followed the Beverly Hilton fiasco, the senator schemed to avoid future problems and actually suggested we move to Bunny Mellon’s estate. That way we would never run into Elizabeth at school events. For her part, Elizabeth would continue the effort to make Cheri feel the kind of pain that comes with intimate betrayal. One of her messages recommended that Cheri call one of John Edwards’s campaign supporters who lived near Figure Eight Island to hear about how I had used their home there as a love nest: “You need to call Russell at the beach and find out why we had the locks changed on the house . . . so that Andrew would not use it with his girlfriends. We were told about it by people at the beach. Ask Russell.”
When I learned what was happening at the Edwards estate during the time Elizabeth was troubling herself with calls to us, I was amazed to hear she had the time or energy to even think about us. According to Senator Edwards, she was consulting with advisers and even brought a bunch of them, including Jennifer Palmieri and Harrison Hickman, to the mansion for a big pow-wow about how to handle the Enquirer’s false story. In a whispered phone conversation, Edwards told me that while helicopters carrying photographers circled overhead, they’d decided, with Mrs. Edwards’s leadership, that honesty would be the best policy. The senator was going to go on television with a respected and fair-minded journalist—Bob Woodruff of ABC News—and tell the story. He would do it on August 8, as the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games in China were being broadcast, in hopes that most of the world would ignore him in favor of the spectacle at Beijing National Stadium.
This plan seemed idiotic to me. First of all, the story the senator was planning to tell, of a brief affair and blackmail, was still an incomprehensible lie. Second, the supposed “spy photos” the National Enquirer published on August 6 were, as far as I could tell, fakes. Edwards had gone to the Beverly Hilton wearing a blue button-down shirt. The pictures showed him holding a baby and wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt. It was the wrong shirt, and anyone who knew the guy understood that he would never walk through a hotel lobby looking like such a mess.
The senator and I discussed his decision by phone after my family and I had departed for Santa Barbara for good. With the press descending on our house, we had gone to Los Angeles to hide at Disneyland before our flight home. The motel we booked near Disneyland was a Fairfield Inn, where we had a room on an upper floor. With five of us sharing a room, the only privacy I could find for the call with him was next to an ice machine. I leaned against the wall, looked out over the busy street, and begged Edwards to delay his decision. As a candidate, he had sold himself to the public as an especially moral, Christian family man. His wife had cancer. It would be far wiser, I said, to wait to see what the press really had and tell the whole truth—the real truth—only when he couldn’t avoid it.
I was not alone in my assessment of the situation. Bunny Mellon, whose love for John Edwards was sincere, believed that he should simply stay silent and ride out the storm. Bunny had lived through JFK’s infidelity and knew of the affairs carried on by her men in her life. In her view, powerful men should be expected to behave this way—indeed, they might even have a right to break the rules—and only unsophisticated dolts expected anything else. Her advice? Tell the whole truth or nothing at all. (Bunny also offered to send another check and to let us stay at her home in Antigua to regroup.)
In the end, neither Bunny nor I could get him out of the trap he had created for himself. Using his considerable powers of persuasion, the senator had lied to Elizabeth repeatedly and was now boxed in by his story and her need to take action.
At two o’clock on August 5, I was standing in line for the Buzz Light-year ride when Fred called to tell me that Edwards had definitely decided to do the interview. Since the press would jump on the story, he wanted to get Rielle and the baby out of the country. Then he asked if I could get Rielle’s passport, which was stored somewhere in Chapel Hill, delivered to him.
“When?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the problem. She is flying out tomorrow morning.”
When she heard what Fred had asked, Cheri couldn’t believe they would request more favors. But I saw the drama coming to an end, and I was eager to see it all resolved even though there wasn’t much time to get the passport to FedEx. While she and the kids went off to have more fun, I went to a restaurant overlooking Tom Sawyer Island. Steamboat whistles and fake cannonfire sounded in the background as I made seventeen calls. During these calls, I made notes on a cardboard lunch box (Alvin and the Chipmunks) and the price tag from a Beanie Baby toy. Eventually, I was able to arrange to get the passport delivered to a company called Mobile Air in Mobile, Alabama, care of pilot Ronald Gehlken. (Gehlken would fly Rielle to a Caribbean island for a brief stay.)
After Rielle’s escape was arranged, the senator called three times. In one call, he thanked me. But in the others, he railed about reports popping up on the Internet. Radar.com had said that Cheri had told the whole story of Rielle and the senator to her hairstylist in Chapel Hill. Another blog said our landlords had been the source of the money used to fund Rielle’s life in hiding. Edwards yelled at me, saying that all along he had thought we had been “the leak.” Fred agreed with him. They were convinced and angry with us. I told them they were being ridiculous. “Think about it. Cheri hasn’t had her hair cut in Chapel Hill since we went on the run. She couldn’t have told anyone there anything.”
On Friday, August 8, prime-time viewers across the country saw Edwards, in shirtsleeves, sit with the ABC correspondent and answer every question with contrite and seemingly sincere statements that were absolutely false. Here are some key passages:
JOHN EDWARDS: In 2006, two years ago, I made a very serious mistake. A mistake that I am responsible for and no one else. In 2006, I told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for His forgiveness. And we have kept this within our family since that time. All of my family knows about this, and just to be absolutely clear, none of them are responsible for it. I am responsible for it. I alone am responsible for it. And it led to this most recent incident at the Beverly Hilton. I was at the Beverly Hilton. I was there for a very simple reason, because I was trying to keep this mistake that I had made from becoming public.
BOB WOODRUFF: I know this is a very difficult question, but were you in love with [Rielle Hunter]?
JOHN EDWARDS: I’m in love with one woman. I’ve been in love with one woman for thirty-one years. She is the finest human being I have ever known. And the fact that she is with me after this having happened is a testament to the kind of woman and the kind of human being she is. There is a deep and abiding love that exists between Elizabeth and myself. It’s always been there, it in my judgment has never gone away.
Here’s what, can I explain to you what happened? First of all, it happened during a period after she was in remission from cancer; t
hat’s no excuse in any possible way for what happened. This is what happened. It’s what happened with me and I think happens unfortunately more often sometimes with other people. . . . Ego. Self-focus, self-importance. Now, I was slapped down to the ground when my son Wade died in 1996, in April of 1996. But then after that I ran for the Senate and I got elected to the Senate, and here we go again, it’s the same old thing again. Adulation, respect, admiration. Then I went from being a senator, a young senator, to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate, and becoming a national public figure. All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism, that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You’re invincible. And there will be no consequences. And nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.
The reaction to the interview was swift and mostly harsh, and the Olympics did not keep the media from covering the story. News outlets around the world published excerpts. Editorial writers, columnists, and bloggers flayed the senator in their commentaries, and political types announced the death of his relevance in national affairs. It was very strange to see reporters offering detailed accounts of a story we had lived with for so long.
Later I heard of additional developments that never reached the public. For example, Edwards told me that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton phoned his wife to say they were sorry about what was happening and to tell her she was in their prayers. Bill Clinton, a veteran of his own sexual disgrace and attempted cover-up, called the senator and said, in effect, “How’d you get caught?”
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