What Really Happened

by Rielle Hunter

  I was really losing patience with this control freak insanity. Johnny and Elizabeth and the Southport Realtor then got together with Amy Lothrop, a Charlotte Realtor, and searched Charlotte. They put in two offers on houses that didn’t go through and then purchased a house on Providence Road that was very nice, even though it was on a very busy street, which made it bad for the media but made it more affordable. I was very excited about moving to Charlotte and ending the house search. I must have inspected at least a hundred houses.

  I packed up the U-Haul again. About two hours into our drive from Southport, pulling the U-Haul to the new house, it occurred to the “Team” that Quinn and I should not be allowed to move in without signing a child support agreement, so they quickly pulled something together. Obviously, they had all the power, and this was a shitty thing to do at the last minute while we were in transit. The agreement was so ridiculous that my lawyer said, “There is no way I am allowing my client to sign that.” And I agreed with my lawyer. One of their demands was to charge me rent on the house they had just bought for Quinn. The rent was to be taken out of the child support, which would have left us with basically no money. The “Team” said, “Fine. She and her daughter can’t move into the house.”

  So there I was at the Marriott in Charlotte, U-Haul attached to my car, toddler attached to my hip, and no place to live. Through my tears, I asked the Team Edwards Realtor if he could stay for a day and help us find a place to live, given our terrible circumstances, made even worse because we had just spotted a weird van in the parking lot. Clearly, the National Enquirer was stalking the hotel. (And, in fact, they published pictures of Quinn and I in the parking lot the following week.) Thank God that, aside from all the agendas he had to work around, the Realtor actually had a heart. He stayed and helped us find a rental house.

  I didn’t put my full name on the lease, and our landlord had no idea who we were. She didn’t even know my name and the Realtor wouldn’t tell her, citing privacy reasons. Of course, she found out soon thereafter because it was all over the news and the house was surrounded with media people. My neighbors quickly learned the media game and were very protective. It is amazing to me how many people do not like the media. I got texts or phone calls the second an odd car was spotted near my house.

  After the lease was signed, I drove with Quinn for three hours to Apex, North Carolina, to meet the movers the following morning at the storage unit. (In September, Mimi had put all of my stuff from the rental house in Chapel Hill into storage.) That night, after three stops, we finally found a hotel near the storage unit. I fed and bathed Quinn and put her to bed. I got a text message from Johnny—I hadn’t spoken a word to him since I testified in August. The text read, “How’s Quinn?”

  I was so angry that I almost threw my phone across the room. I thought of many replies, including, “Sleeping peacefully until you woke her up with your stupid text,” and, “Your daughter is great only because she has a mother who lives and breathes for her,” and “Your daughter is great no thanks to you, motherfucker!” Instead, I didn’t respond. I know better than to take an action in reaction. It gets you nowhere but the same place you’ve been before, and that was not a place I was interested in returning to. I wasn’t even sure how he got my new cell phone number. It turns out the Southport Realtor had given it to him.

  And because the Realtor had given my number to Johnny, Elizabeth made the Realtor into the reason that she and Johnny were not going to make it as a couple and were going to divorce. I am not kidding. She really blamed a Realtor, a twenty-three-year-old kid she had known for a few months. It was all his fault. She screamed at him!

  Once we settled into the rental, I immediately did what all mothers would do: I found Quinn a pediatrician, dentist, and “mommy and me” activities.

  About a week into our new city, through the lawyers I was told that Johnny had presents that he wanted to give Quinn for Christmas, so a meeting was arranged under a confidentiality agreement. No one ever told me that Elizabeth was going to be there. Had I known that Elizabeth planned to be there, I would have rejected the meeting outright. I didn’t want to put my daughter in a position to be used by her crazy schemes. In fact, I didn’t find out that she had been at the Christmas present meeting with Quinn until January, when she broke the confidentiality agreement spinning it to the media as Johnny’s statement on paternity hit the airwaves. Johnny was in Haiti. When he called, I screamed at him. The first time ever. I have never been so angry in my entire life.

  Elizabeth was a master at spin. Yes, she got Quinn Christmas presents. But she also would never admit to any behavior that didn’t present herself as the moral and wonderful person she believed herself to be, which sadly meant she never admitted to most of her behavior. When Quinn was to go under sedation for dental work at the end of December, Elizabeth called Johnny’s parents and forbade them from going to the hospital to be with Quinn. They said, “Sorry, Elizabeth, she is our granddaughter. We are going.”

  Apparently, Johnny couldn’t bear to think of not being there for his daughter at the hospital. Elizabeth screamed at him, “If you go to be with her at the hospital, we are done!”

  He said, “She is my daughter, and I am going.”

  “I am going to divorce you!”

  So after thirty-plus years of marriage, Johnny had had enough of the power struggle and took the first step toward taking control of his own life. He got in his car and drove to Charlotte.

  Shortly after midnight on December 29th, there was a knock on my door. All my lights were out. I looked outside and I couldn’t see a car. And then came a hammering on the front door. I screamed, “Yes?” My heart was pounding.

  And then I heard, “It’s me. Open the door.”

  I opened the door, and there he was, in an overcoat, white T-shirt, dark pants, and black tennis shoes, smiling. “Why aren’t you happy to see me?”

  Yes, there he was, standing in the foyer, teasing me, as though nothing had ever happened between us.

  Quinn almost jumped out of my arms to get to him.

  It was so surprising to me that she knew exactly who he was and was so happy to see him, because so far in her life she had only spent about three hours with him, total. She looked at him in exactly the same way she did the first time he held her, the look she gives only to him.

  “How’s my sweet girl?”

  She beamed. She was so excited—actually, she needed to be sleeping. A married mom once said to me, “I can’t imagine having an infant with no help.” I replied that there are actually some real advantages: no arguments, no power struggles about how to do it, and no frustrations about the type of (opposite) help that comes from a dad. But then again, having a dad is having a dad, and nothing can take the place of that important relationship.

  Quinn’s first trick-or-treating outing in Charlotte. Quinn always wants her dad to sit in the backseat next to her and Johnny always obliges.

  And that night there were some badly needed extra hands for childcare. In order to sedate an infant for surgery there are rules, including no food or liquid after midnight. I finally got Quinn to sleep, but she was still accustomed to a feeding in the middle of the night in order to go back to sleep. So when she woke up a few hours later, she was unhappy and let us know it. We got in my car, Johnny in front, Quinn and I in the backseat. He turned the heat up high, immediately putting her back to sleep. We drove around Charlotte until we needed to get ready to go to the hospital at 5 a.m. All the while, Elizabeth was texting him divorce messages.

  We returned to the house, and Johnny lay with Quinn while she slept and I got ready. Then he helped put her in the car. She woke up a little bit and said, “Bye, Daddy,” then went right back to sleep. He told me that his parents were meeting me at the hospital and he was going to go back to deal with Elizabeth. I was too exhausted from that night and the past four months, and too nervous
for Quinn, to care what he did. I kissed him goodbye and told him I loved him. I got in the car and drove to the hospital.

  Grandma Bobbie and Granddaddy were there waiting for us. Grandma Bobbie said to me, “Rielle, I don’t know if it helps you or hurts you for us to be here, but we just had to be here. Quinn is our granddaughter and we love her.”

  Having them with me was a big help. I am so grateful that they were so insistent from the very beginning about being in Quinn’s life. I didn’t understand at that point the degree to which Elizabeth ostracized them and kept them away from Emma and Jack, or how much it meant to them to be close to Quinn. I still struggle helping Quinn develop her relationship with her grandparents because of the way that I grew up. I am not used to making strong efforts to keep close.

  Having a family like Johnny’s was a new experience for me. They love unconditionally and they don’t speak to the press. Although, Johnny’s sister Kathy still regrets that she didn’t publicly tell the truth about Elizabeth. Kathy told me that for decades she was frustrated and miserable about her sister-in-law, and no one would address it. The response was always, “She’s Johnny’s wife.” They were not going to deal with it or even talk about it. They prayed for her.

  Johnny called on Wednesday night from the beach saying that he and Elizabeth were officially separated. He told me that she had physically attacked him again in a fight (something she later accused him of in an email to a “friend,” which made it into the National Enquirer, and which she refused to correct publicly). He said that he had finally had enough of her berating him for being such an awful person. He was in bad shape. I felt awful for him.

  At midnight on New Year’s Eve, he called to wish us a happy new year.

  As usual, Elizabeth was tracking his phone to determine his whereabouts and to find out what numbers he was calling. She cited this midnight phone call as the deal breaker for her, even though they were already separated.

  When they signed the separation agreement, the actual separation was dated December 30th, which meant that under North Carolina law, they could get divorced one year from that date.

  Elizabeth sent me a weird email on the day they separated. It was from one of her hidden email accounts. The name on the account was Joyce Oates. The subject line was simply “Johnny’s cell phone number.” A month later she sent my lawyer an email, from her office email account, carbon copying me. The subject line on this one read, “A claim against Hunter” and in it she claimed that I was liable under North Carolina law for criminal conversation and alienation of affection. However, she was willing not to pursue claims against me—to settle—if I signed an agreement that was framed around the following parts:

  1. “Hunter will not write or talk about John, me, any member of my family, our home, or any conduct of or communication with such persons . . . except that Hunter may talk to Frances Quinn Hunter about her father.”

  2.“that in the event that Hunter violates this agreement (and each time she violates this agreement, if she violates it more than once and for each memorialization or copy she fails to tender), she agrees that she will pay the Wade Edwards Foundation the amount of $1,400,000.00 within ten days of notice of violation.”

  It went on and on, and she signed her name at the bottom. Reading it was so sad to me. My lawyer and I simply ignored it. I told Johnny about it, and he replied, “That’s just more of Elizabeth’s craziness.” I could hear the sadness in his voice.

  Once they separated and we were talking again, Johnny and I both moved forward immediately and signed a child support agreement so he could publicly claim paternity. I think because of my intense desire to move forward, to finally be free from all this mess and move on with our lives, I made some big mistakes. I signed a child support agreement that wasn’t great at all. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t fabulous. I also did a magazine interview that I shouldn’t have done or at least should have had PR help with arranging.

  People just have no idea what it’s really like when the media is after you, camped outside your house, following you around town, popping up in between cars in a parking lot while you’re trying to get a baby out of her car seat safely, and then she hits her head because a photographer jumped up out of nowhere. I am not asking for sympathy. I am simply saying that there is no parade happening here. We attempt to get from Point A to Point B as safely and privately as we can. Cameras have been following us since I was pregnant. I have had to put big sunglasses or hats on Quinn to cover her face since she was an infant. It’s now become something that she’s accustomed to.

  She loves her sunglasses. She has many pairs and doesn’t go outside without them.

  The back deck of Johnny’s rental house, 2010. We spent a lot of time there cooking out on the grill and dancing.

  I now view speaking soon after Johnny had publicly claimed paternity as a mistake. It was too soon (to say the least) and only helped make the media go away a little bit. I just had no idea what kind of legs this story actually had, that it was not going to die no matter what I did. Right around the time that Johnny publicly stated, “I am Quinn’s father,” after he had returned from Haiti, Barbara Walters’s producer Katie called to tell me that there was in fact a sex tape, and that ABC producers had seen it.

  “Oh, and by the way, it pains me to ask you this because it is so wrong and I hate my job, but I have to ask: Andrew and Cheri also have property that clearly belongs to you, and those ABC producers want your permission to use it.”

  What floors me about this is that the producers, James Hill and Natalie Shabilat, watched the tape (there aren’t words to describe how gross that feels to me) but never publicly disclosed that little fact to anyone. And then to top it off, they went ahead and broadcast one of Andrew and Cheri’s many false claims: that I was pregnant on the tape!

  I replied to Katie in a louder-than-normal voice, “Whatever photos or tape that the Youngs have that look like mine is stolen property, and I will fucking sue your asses if you use my property.”

  I hung up and called Johnny, who had just moved into his new rental house, and told him, “Apparently the tape does exist, and I need a lawyer. I need a lawyer fast. Please give me a name.”

  I called my New Jersey lawyer, Mike Critchley, and he called Wade Barber, the lawyer Johnny suggested, and then I spoke to Wade. And then Wade did something wonderful and brilliant: he brought in my knights in shining armor, two of the greatest lawyers on the planet, and just downright stellar individuals, Alan Duncan and Allison Van Laningham. I truly love them, especially Allison. Besides being downright brilliant, day after day, she selflessly goes the extra mile, never ceasing to amaze me.

  Quinn and I left town before the 20/20 interview aired. We went to the mountains to spend the weekend with my dear friend Burr Collier from my horse show days. After watching the fiction-filled interview with the Youngs, followed by a glorious weekend in the mountains, we headed to Johnny’s new rental house in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

  And there, in his new ultra-green, modern rental house, in the middle of nowhere, Quinn and her dad fell madly in love with each other. They would cook together, catch fireflies, hunt for bugs, do sticker books, and play “Ring Around The Rosie.” One great thing about not living with your dad full-time is that when you are with him, you get all of him. When it comes to Quinn, Johnny is completely attentive. Not many little girls get that.

  We met Johnny’s sister Kathy and her husband, Steve, for the first time in that house. We also celebrated Quinn’s second birthday with her grandparents in that house. And when the GQ interview hit the newstands on March 15th, 2010, Quinn and I were safely tucked away in that house with Johnny, retreating from the worldwide venom that was directed at me, with the help of stupid pictures, and the souped-up hounding from the media, all wanting my exclusive TV interview.

  Eventually I decided to give a TV interview and went with Opr
ah as my choice. She got my interview for the same reason she gets all the great interviews: because Oprah doesn’t operate like everyone else in the news media. She doesn’t chase you down. She doesn’t bully you. She doesn’t attempt to seduce you. The interviews are not fear-based. Your boundaries are respected. She and her team do what they say they will do.

  Johnny’s rental house, 2010. Quinn loves to help him cook. They spend a lot of time together in the kitchen.

  But I have to admit that I was a little concerned when Oprah’s producer Jill called one day during the decision-making phase to tell me that Oprah would like to come to my house. I was even more uneasy when Jill told me that Oprah doesn’t go to many houses. I thought back over the years I had seen Oprah and I realized that was true. People usually go to Oprah—she doesn’t go to them. Yes, she had gone to Elizabeth’s house, though she didn’t go to the Youngs. (Too bad, because it might have explained to us all where the money I allegedly received actually was.) And yet her wanting to come to my house didn’t make sense. I couldn’t even picture it in my head. Oprah Winfrey, the Queen of TV, at my little rental house? Life just doesn’t get more surreal than that. I said yes.

  Oprah’s people came the day before she did and turned my downstairs into a tiny TV studio. When Oprah arrived the next day, she did not disappoint. Stepping out of a black SUV surrounded by security guards in my tiny driveway, hair and makeup getting touched up as she was being miked, there was no mistaking who the power source was in this operation. The way her staff responded to her arrival, in a flawless, drama-free work mode, was like nothing I’d ever seen before. And as all of this was going on, she yelled out, “Hi Ri!” as if she had known me my whole life.

  There were a lot of angry people who did not want Oprah to interview me, to give me any attention whatsoever, to “reward” what they viewed as my bad behavior. I understand that thinking. I even said to Oprah myself, “I sent you a letter back in 2004, when I was all love and light, and you ignored it. I go and have an affair with a presidential candidate, get knocked up, have a child born out of wedlock while his wife has cancer, and then you show up at my door. What’s up with that?”