What Really Happened

by Rielle Hunter

  I spoke to Lisa while we were there and it lifted my spirits greatly. She asked me if I had a name for my daughter yet. I said I liked Frances, but her dad wasn’t sold on it, so I wasn’t sure yet. I never offered up who that dad was. But when I spoke to Lisa, I immediately got the feeling that it was all going to be okay.

  Lisa also found me a doctor in Aspen to visit for a checkup. I went and really liked the doctor but was uncomfortable about having my baby in Aspen. I still didn’t know where I was going to give birth, but it was now certain that it wouldn’t be in North Carolina because the Enquirer had already staked out my doctor’s office there. I thought often about leaving the country but I really wanted her to be born in America.

  We had to leave Aspen because Fred and Lisa had promised the house to someone else for New Year’s and they couldn’t get out of that commitment.

  Andrew chose San Diego. Why, I have no idea. We flew privately to San Diego, minus the babysitter this time.

  I had a junior suite at the Loews Coronado Bay, where I immediately fell asleep upon hitting my room. The Youngs had big problems with their room and with the hotel service. I don’t know what was going on with them. They were very unhappy but fortunately were in a building far away from me. They ended up in an extra-large, two-bedroom suite on the water, but to Cheri it smelled like pee or something. She was complaining all about it. And then—OMG—the unthinkable happened: Andrew forgot her birthday! She did not let that go. He was punished on and off for that for as long as I was with them.

  We spent New Year’s Eve in San Diego having room service in the Youngs’ pee-smelling suite overlooking the water, watching the ball drop in Times Square on TV.

  Meanwhile, Johnny was campaigning like a madman, 24/7. He would call Andrew’s cell or Andrew would connect me to him somehow. I just remember Johnny being in that totally different reality—the campaign bubble—surrounded by people who wanted to hear what he was saying, and relying on subjective people for his information. He was also very sweet to me on the phone. I could feel how much he loved me and missed me.

  We went on a private plane back to Aspen—more cold and more altitude—which I wasn’t thrilled about. But hey, whatever. The Iowa caucuses were around the corner, and then it would all be over.

  At around 5:30 in the morning, I was awakened by Cheri screaming. I got out of bed, and Cheri was in the entryway of their bedroom going at it with Elizabeth on the phone. Elizabeth tracked Johnny’s phone calls and had seen a call to Cheri’s cell. Elizabeth’s tracking had started in December 2006. This is something that never changed, even well into 2010, long after they were separated, until Johnny got a phone under his own name where she couldn’t track his whereabouts or his calls.

  I watched the Iowa caucuses in Fred’s den. I couldn’t believe Johnny came in second, but more importantly, I couldn’t believe he was staying in. I had a bit of a reaction to this because I expected that he would be getting out after Iowa. He was planning on getting out and thought he would come in third. Now, he couldn’t exactly make a graceful exit when everyone around him wanted him to continue. Whatever.

  I retired to my bedroom. I had more pressing matters to think about, like where I was going to give birth, an issue that became more important each day because I could no longer fly after thirty-six weeks of pregnancy.

  I picked Santa Barbara. First of all, that place is heaven on earth. Second, and more importantly, my dear, dear friend of fifteen years, Bob, who is the sweetest soul and a great source of comfort for me, lived there. I wanted him to be with me when I gave birth, no matter where that birth took place, so why not just go to him?

  I refused to budge on this. Maybe this was diva behavior, but I was tired of all the traveling, living out of a suitcase, and the cold weather and the altitude. I was at the end of my rope and about to give birth.

  Our odd journey across the country ended up putting me in the most divine city for my daughter to come into the world.

  I have more admiration for people, especially celebrities, when I learn that they chose to live in Santa Barbara. When Oprah Winfrey, who lives in Santa Barbara, was at my house in Charlotte, we briefly chatted about it. I said to her, “There is nothing wrong with Santa Barbara.” And in total agreement, she replied, “There is nothing wrong with Santa Barbara.”

  And to be able to be born there? Yes, my daughter is indeed one lucky little girl.

  SEVENTEEN

  The End of Just Me

  “The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.”

  —Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

  After the New Year, I sent Jonathan Darman a brief email that said, “Thanks for your e-mail. Sorry to hear about your dad, but happy you get to spend time with him. We will talk again one day. Until then, lots of love.”

  He responded, “Good, I hope that day is soon. You know where to find me. Love, J.”

  While we were staying at the Four Seasons Santa Barbara, Andrew was house-hunting with a Realtor, and he was telling people that I was his sister Jaya. We all went and looked at a few houses. None of them was right for our living situation, which was comical: pregnant mistress in hiding, three small kids, and a never-been-in-therapy, often-fighting married couple. And then just when we thought we would never find anything suitable, a big beige house in a gated community in Montecito, California, became available.

  The house also came with a hefty price tag: twenty thousand dollars a month. But it worked because there was enough space for us to have our own ends of the house. As much as I loved the Youngs (and I really did at that point), I needed privacy for my new baby and me. I am a private person and need my own space. We did have some common areas: the kitchen, the TV area off the kitchen, and the laundry. But I would be also able to close my door to my section and shut them out (or so I thought). They had the other end of the house, with the master bedroom, an extra bedroom for the kids, and an office for their busy work of building their five-thousand-square-foot, two-million-dollar dream home back in North Carolina. Of course, I never stopped to think at that point how they could build such a house on a political staffer’s salary. Neither of them came from any money. In fact, it was very clear that they didn’t. So how much money could they have possibly made from the sale of their other house? It’s clear now, but at the time I just never thought about it.

  Even as rich as he was, Fred gave Andrew a lot of push back on the hefty rent. I mean, come on, twenty thousand dollars a month is twenty thousand dollars a month. So Andrew basically spelled it out very clearly, stopping just short of directly telling Fred that Johnny was my baby’s father. Apparently this is when Fred went to Johnny directly and asked him for the first time if he was in fact my baby’s father.

  And Johnny said no.

  Johnny lied to his friend.

  Johnny called me screaming. The second and only other time he has ever screamed at me. “What is Andrew doing? Fred said Andrew all but said directly that I was the father of your baby!”

  “Stop screaming at me! I didn’t talk to Fred nor do I have any interest in your anger.”

  We hung up.

  This happened somewhere between January 7th and 11th. It was at the Four Seasons Resort in Santa Barbara, right before we moved into the big beige house. I believe Fred had no idea what the truth was when he offered to help us get out of North Carolina. Nor do I believe he was doing it to follow Johnny’s instructions. I believe Fred was telling the truth when he publicly said that in August 2008. I also believe Fred did not think that his financial help was a campaign violation. The Fred I knew would have never knowingly violated a campaign finance law! I believe Fred helped because that’s what Fred did: he helped people. In fact, Fred continued helping me way after Johnny’s political career was long over.

  A
lso around that time, I found a doctor I trusted. I was still in a great deal of pain. I wasn’t moving much, just to the tub and back, and spent a minimum of five hours a day soaking.

  My doctor had a great sense of humor. Naturally, because I was now living under an alias, I had no medical records, so he had to redo all my blood work. He asked me in a very jovial manner, “Who are you running from—the dad?”

  “Nope,” I replied, smiling, without offering an answer.

  He handed me a copy of all my blood work, and said, “Well, here, you might need this in case you run away from me before your baby comes out.”

  The other great thing about being back in California (the land of the free, wacky, and celebrity) is that when you fill out your medical forms, there is a line for your legal name and then next to it a line for your aka. Of course, I wasn’t about to write Rielle Hunter. As much as I liked my doctor, it seemed unwise to trust anyone with my real name right now. I listed only Jaya James.

  Once we moved out of the hotel and into the big beige house, I went shopping for baby stuff. I went to a store called Chicken Little and got everything I needed. There was a lady there who was also pregnant with a girl. She was so great—she just flew through the whole store: “You need this, you need this, you need this”—one-stop shopping. You name it, I got it: changing table, stroller, car seat, Baby Björn, baby clothes, Diaper Genie. One day and five thousand dollars later, I was ready to have a baby.

  Andrew and Cheri went car shopping and bought a Lexus SUV for Cheri. I don’t know Lexus models very well, but whatever it was, it was pricey—a far cry from Cheri’s minivan that she drove back in North Carolina. They also began shopping for everything under the sun that they felt they needed to make their lives extra happy. Andrew bought a top-of-the-line treadmill, full weight-lifting gym for the garage, a new large HDTV for their bedroom (the ones already in the house were just not good enough), plus toys, basketball nets, motorized cars, and a huge trampoline with a net for the back yard. And clothes! Those kids had more clothes than I had ever seen. They also hired a home school teacher for the kids.

  In the big beige house, February 2008. I had ventured way beyond uncomfortable—tipping the scales at a whopping 166lbs!

  January 23rd, 2008: I read in the indictment four years later that, on this day, Andrew received another check from Bunny for two hundred thousand dollars. This is crazy to me because the Youngs were still telling me that they needed to be reimbursed for all the money they had spent on me so far, which they claimed came from the sale of their house in Raleigh. Their money, not Bunny’s. And they went on to hold this “their money” thing over my head a lot of the time. Cheri would scream at me, “This is our car! We bought it!” (She was speaking of my used BMW.) And silly, stupid me, I believed them. So in reality, they had now almost seven hundred thousand dollars from Bunny. The checks went to Cheri and were deposited under her maiden name. Andrew was no longer putting any money into my account; that had stopped December 4th, 2007. In total, he had deposited thirty-eight thousand dollars into my account over a period of seven months. To me thirty-eight thousand dollars is a far cry from seven hundred thousand dollars.

  And as crazy as that sounds, it got even crazier.

  Andrew was also employed by Nick Baldick at the 527. Andrew probably got a hefty commission on his Bunny money that he got for Nick. He also told me that when he started working for Nick, he got a raise and was making more money than he did working for the senator. Although, given the facts (and fiction) that later came out of Andrew’s mouth about money, I have no idea what was actually true about his employment with the 527.

  On January 25th, I got an email from a woman named Susanna that said:

  Jon asked me to contact you. Dick Darman passed away this morning after a difficult struggle with leukemia. Jon, Emmet, and Willie all had an opportunity to say goodbye. Please keep the Darmans in your thoughts and prayers. I will be in touch as soon as arrangements are made.

  Another note came two days later:

  A memorial service will be held for Dick Darman at St. John’s Episcopal Church in McLean, VA, on Saturday, February 9th, at 2 p.m. St. John’s is located at 6715 Georgetown Pike, McLean, VA 22101. All are welcome and encouraged to attend. Any correspondence for Jon or his family can be sent to [address]. Jon is so lucky to have such thoughtful friends. Hope to see you on the 9th.

  I felt for my friend Darman. I know what it feels like to lose your father to cancer. I sent flowers to the address with a note saying, “My thoughts and prayers are with you.”

  Johnny called me very early the next morning to tell me that he was going to announce that he was dropping out of the presidential race. His decision happened very quickly—it was like he woke up that morning and he was just done. He didn’t know when he was going to be able to call me again. Overall, he just sounded frazzled. He said, “I just decided I am out of this.” He was in full scrambling mode. “I haven’t told all the people that I need to. I need to go.”

  I was unhappy about him neither having any way to call me nor not telling me of a way to contact him before we hung up. I was about to give birth to his child, and now he “had to go?”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye.”

  I did not hear or see his “family-by-his-side,” out-of-the-race goodbye speech because I was at a doctor’s appointment. I was standing on the sidewalk outside the doctor’s office after the appointment when a friend rang me to tell me about his speech. She had seen it. Then I got some more calls, one from Rob Gordon, as Cheri drove me back to our big beige house in her new Lexus.

  I did not hear from Johnny, which upset me. I felt abandoned. Nine months pregnant with his child, and he drops off the face of the earth?

  Of course, he did call eventually. He was finally able to go to the beach house and call me from the beach landline. I think we didn’t speak for about a week, but it felt longer to me. He told me he was going to buy a disposable phone, one that he could just keep putting money on, with no permanent records involved.

  Once Johnny had the disposable phone, he would just call me directly whenever he wanted and whenever he could. Andrew was no longer needed as telephone operator. Uh-oh—I had a feeling that someone was going to feel rejected. I suspected that not being able to talk to his great love was going to be a big problem for Andrew.

  My due date, February 15th, came and went, and my daughter was not remotely interested in joining me in the world yet. Missing my due date was emotional. For nine months I had expected and hoped to have a baby by a certain date yet there I was, still pregnant! On top of that, I was so, so uncomfortable.

  After continual checkups, in which my doctor made sure everything was okay, he told me that he was going to let me go until February 26th, when he was on call. Those last two weeks felt like an eternity! Normally I would have seen all the doctors in their practice and then whoever was on call would deliver my baby. But because I was a transfer, I saw only my doctor and I really wanted him to deliver my baby. He clearly had a lot of experience, something I could tell when he walked into a room. Out of all the doctors I saw, I felt blessed that he was the one to bring my girl into the world.

  He told me I would go into the hospital on February 26th to begin the process of induction. When February 26th arrived, my friend Bob picked me up. We took pictures with the Youngs and their kids. It was my last night as a pregnant woman. I wanted photos of me weighing 166 pounds. I was fifty pounds pregnant! I had privately been photographing and documenting my belly as it grew and changed over the months. It really was an amazing, wonderful journey becoming a mom. It really was nothing short of a miracle. When I learned later that these pictures had been uploaded onto the Youngs’ computers without my consent or knowledge, and that they’d been making copies upon copies, showing them to God knows who, the violation I felt was beyond words.

  Co
ttage Hospital Santa Barbara, CA, February 26th, 2008. Just before the unbearable pain began.

  As I bid them goodbye, I told the Youngs I would call them and let them know what was going on. I arrived at the hospital, checked in, began induction, and began about three hours of “Oh my God, this hurts!” I began to walk the halls until I couldn’t move anymore because the pain was excruciating. They gave me something for the pain but it didn’t help one bit. My body was acting like it was in full labor, yet I was only one centimeter dilated. They gave me an epidural but it didn’t work quite right, and Quinn’s heart started doing weird things. They broke my water to stick a monitor on her head, and I then went through the most terrifying couple of hours of my life, listening to her heart beat erratically, lying paralyzed as half my body was still feeling the contractions, looking into Bob’s eyes. He kept saying, “She’s fine, she’s going to be just fine.”

  My doctor finally got to the hospital and told me he had been calling to check on me and waited on purpose. What was happening was not that uncommon. He said we could let it go a little longer, or I could opt for a C-section now.

  “Get her out now.”

  “Okay. Let’s get ready.”

  Bob started putting on the scrubs they gave him (in order to meet me in the operating room) as they began wheeling me out of the room. I asked Bob to call the Youngs and tell them I was going in for C-section. I signed the consent papers as they wheeled me down the hall.

  Cottage Hospital Santa Barbara, CA, Feburary 26th, 2008. In labor—walking the halls.

  The second we got into the operating room, Quinn’s heartbeat returned to normal. They said, “Wow, look at that! Her heart is beating completely normally—she’s fine.”