What Really Happened

by Rielle Hunter

  She replied, “It’s all part of the plan.”

  The Divine Plan. Yes, Oprah spoke my language.

  I thought she did a pretty good job with the interview, given that we had talked a long time, and she only had around forty-two minutes of airtime. There were a lot of things that didn’t make it into the interview, and from my perspective, when you want to speak your piece, you want it all in there so that you can feel like, “There, I said it, and I am done.”

  I believe a lot of people could not understand how I—someone who fell in love with a married man, became a mistress, and hid it from the world—could view myself as a spiritual person devoted to Truth. People have all sorts of ideas as to what makes someone spiritual or how a spiritual person is supposed to behave. For me, pledging an allegiance to a set of rules, concepts, or belief systems does not necessarily make someone a kind, loving, and accepting person. To me, spirituality is a state of consciousness—an inner space of silence, love, peace, and contentment (oftentimes called the Truth). And being devoted to that state of consciousness (or Truth) means you are always honest with yourself, you always tell the truth to yourself about all the concepts, thoughts, and feelings within you that are attempting to keep your mind or your attention away from that inner space of love, silence, peace, and contentment.

  There were also questions in the interview that I wished I could have answered more effectively, like, “Do you think you hurt Elizabeth?” I replied that I thought she experienced pain, but you would have to ask her. I didn’t know. What I wish I had said was, “Some people believe that outside events or people cause our pain. I believe it’s not the events on the outside that cause our emotional or psychological pain, but our thoughts about the events that cause our pain. The pain is already within us; it surfaces when the world doesn’t go the way we want it to and given their marriage was a mess long before I got there, and I don’t actually know Elizabeth, I don’t know for sure what thoughts trigger pain for her.”

  Of course, that would have probably increased the backlash because it is not the answer most people want to hear!

  The written reaction turned out to be mostly venomous. The New York Times even compared me to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but said he was actually “a little easier to understand, because he uses translators.” This wasn’t that surprising, besides bashing being a great tool to sell papers when you don’t have a negative reaction to something or don’t have a war raging inside of you, you usually don’t take the time to write about it because you don’t actually care. So the people who watched the interview and understood where I was coming from, would have said, “Cool,” or, “Interesting.” And then instead of rehashing it all over the TV or the Internet they would have moved on to their next pressing thought like, “What should I eat for dinner?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Last Chapter

  Before the Verdict

  “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

  —Mark Twain

  All family holidays come with their own special challenges, but when you are co-parenting with someone who is also co-parenting with Elizabeth Edwards, it gets especially challenging. I didn’t make any plans for Thanksgiving 2010, because it was going to be Quinn’s first Thanksgiving with her father and could easily be Elizabeth’s last, I wanted to give Johnny ample room to fit in all that he felt he needed to do. Plus Cate’s upcoming engagement was in the mix. Johnny’s parents are big on Thanksgiving, and Grandma Bobbie was cooking for Quinn’s cousin Julie and her entire basketball team from Elon University. Johnny decided he wanted to take Jack and Emma to Grandma Bobbie’s, which meant Quinn and I would not be going.

  I was unhappy that Johnny would even ask to take Jack and Emma away from Elizabeth on what might be her last Thanksgiving and I told him so. He said she was fine with it because she wanted to have Thanksgiving with her family at the Ponderosa.

  Christmas in Charlotte, 2011

  So Quinn and I spent a glorious Thanksgiving Day by ourselves, hanging out, eating, watching movies, and playing games. And we planned on having her grandparents and Johnny come on Saturday for our Thanksgiving dinner, after Cate’s engagement celebrations.

  The night before our Saturday Thanksgiving, Johnny was summoned to Elizabeth’s room to be issued her instructions on what she wanted him to do for Jack and Emma for the weekend. Johnny reminded her that he was not available on Saturday because he was going to see Quinn for her Thanksgiving. Elizabeth then flew into her usual tirade, making it about me and how he chose me over her. And now he was choosing that whore again over what he was supposed to be doing for her.

  And I know you may find this shocking but I don’t actually agree with Elizabeth on this. I don’t believe Johnny chose me and I don’t believe he chose Elizabeth. I believe he initially chose fear, self-preservation, and what he thought he was supposed to do based on guilt.

  But Elizabeth believed he chose me over her, even though this particular event was actually about a dad wanting to be with his daughter for Thanksgiving. And as usual, his only way to deal with Elizabeth when she got like that was to leave the room. He came to Charlotte as planned, and we had a great Thanksgiving together.

  Elizabeth got very ill the following Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to go to the emergency room. By the following Wednesday, they told her to get her affairs in order.

  As far as I know, that was the last fight they ever had. Once she went into the hospital and the prognosis was shrunk to weeks or days left, Johnny let everything negative that came out of her mouth roll off his back. He moved back into the barn and took care of her.

  Having been through the final stages of cancer at my father’s bedside, I understood completely what they were going through in her last week. Johnny would check in a few times a day. He was clearly in that otherworldly, death-is-near reality.

  As anyone who has been there knows, it is very difficult to go through, sitting beside a dying loved one. A week feels like a lifetime. I am very grateful and happy to report that they did finally find some peace with each other in her final days.

  Her passing was strange, an emotional and odd event for everyone on Johnny’s side of the family. Everyone had, to varying degrees, been ostracized or attacked by Elizabeth.

  His family was truly sad about her passing but they were also very much looking forward to getting Johnny back and being able to spend time with him again.

  After Elizabeth passed away, and after I had talked to Johnny, I spoke to Kathy, Johnny’s sister. She hadn’t spoken to Johnny yet but was afraid to call the house. She wanted to know whether she should just call his cell. This really upset me, to learn that she was afraid to call her own brother’s house. I told Johnny about it, and he said, “Years of getting screamed at has had an effect on all of my family. But all of that is going to change now.”

  Elizabeth’s passing was a media event like nothing I have ever seen, especially for the wife of a one-time senator and twice-failed presidential candidate. The tabloids immediately went to work, making up horrendous things about that awful Rielle Hunter and her rush to make wedding plans now that Elizabeth was dead. A stranger actually stopped me in the grocery store less than twenty-four hours after her death and asked me, “So are you just going to wait six months and then get married?”

  Many people were triggered to spew their venom at me one more time, reeled in by the story of the brave, graceful Elizabeth, the skank mistress, and the evil husband whom “she cut out of her will,” as the CBS Nightly News reported. That is so ridiculous to me—as in, she hated him so much she left him no money? That will show him!

  In the months after Elizabeth passed, I regretted not trying to talk to her and come to some sort of truce, for Emma and Jack and Quinn. Because Elizabeth drilled such awful nonsense into the heads of her children about me, it has made it logistically
difficult for him to spend as much time with Quinn as we both would like. I’m sure that will change in time, but it’s hard now because I feel Quinn ends up getting the short end of the stick too often. She deserves to have her dad in her life much more than she has him. Johnny believes my attempts to talk to Elizabeth would not have changed anything. And at this point, because of how Elizabeth operated, I will take Johnny at his word. He has not been wrong about her once.

  In January 2011 I went and met with Jim Cooney, one of Johnny’s lawyers. This was the first time I had met him and learned the specifics and magnitude of Andrew and Cheri’s behavior. Jim told me how much the checks were for and when they were written—a total of $325,000 by September 26th, 2007 the day before the National Enquirer showed up at my door in New Jersey. But because Jim did not show me the checks, I did not see them with my own eyes, and because the investigation was still going on, I felt the feds must have something that I couldn’t figure out. They must have something on Johnny, some kind of concrete evidence of an actual crime.

  I was actually surprised that the Obama administration’s Department of Justice never killed the investigation. Knowing the facts, it still doesn’t make any sense to me.

  Following Johnny’s lawyer’s instructions, I wasn’t involved, nor did Johnny talk to me about the negotiations of trying to work out a plea bargain. Johnny called around 11 p.m. the night before the indictment. He and his team were hunkered down at the Ponderosa. He told me that he told his lawyers that it just wasn’t right, “that you are Quinn’s mom and they clearly know how close I am to you.” It wasn’t right that I didn’t know what was going on. “This directly affects you and Quinn. You should know.” But his lawyers were adamant about Johnny not telling me because I could be a key witness. Johnny said that his lawyers were going to call me in the morning.

  He already knew my position. I had asked days before, “So if you went to jail, what kind of jail would it be? One of those country clubs?”

  He said, “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “Probably Virginia.”

  “So Quinn and I will move to Virginia. Virginia is a great state.”

  I wanted him to fight, regardless of how painful it was going to be for everyone. At this point in his life, I didn’t think the best course for him would be to lie, to say he was guilty of something that he wasn’t in order to make the nightmare go away. Wasn’t that exactly what he did before, lie to make a nightmare go away?

  Greg Craig, another one of Johnny’s lawyers, never called me in the morning. And right around 10 a.m., the local press started banging on my front door. (Apparently they were still not wise to the fact that I had a publicist and that they were trespassing.) Thank God I had a babysitter that day. She closed the curtains and the shutters. I informed Quinn that it was a camera day, which in our house means no going outside! Quinn was fine with that. It was too hot anyway, and she was happy playing with her babysitter. I then called the cops on the office line as I turned on the TV. Then I called my friend, the pastor at the church next door, and asked him to please come over and tell these local media people to get off my property! That was something I couldn’t do, because if they saw me or I uttered a word, they would record it and it would be on the news. Of course, the pastor was accustomed to his neighborly task. He was so sweet and protective of us. He sometimes rang my cell to alert me, “Just wanted you to be aware, in case you haven’t seen them, you have visitors parked outside your house.” Anyway, he came over immediately and the first round of press departed. The cops arrived. I told the officer it was going to be a busy media day and asked if he could do some drive-bys. “No problem,” he said.

  Playtime at Johnny’s house is never-ending—from the playhouse, to the trampoline, to the basketball court, to the pool . . . etc.

  He left, and my cell rang. It was Johnny. I walked upstairs as I picked up. “I take it there was no deal.” As I was talking to him, I heard loud aggressive banging on my front door. I looked down from the upstairs window and saw the top of a curly head of hair. “I’ve got Jim Morrill knocking on my door. Right now. He’s pounding away like he owns the place.” How scary is it that I can identify Jim Morrill, a political reporter from the Charlotte Observer whom I have never met, by spotting the top of his head?

  “I’ve got helicopters circling my house,” Johnny said.

  “So I take it there is an indictment. At least that’s what they’re reporting on the news.”

  “Yeah, wait till you hear what they wanted. A deal just wasn’t going to happen.”

  “As you know, I’m happy about that.”

  “It has been moved to the middle district. I have to drive to Winston-Salem.”

  “Why has it been moved?”

  “I don’t know yet. I have to get dressed and go.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I love you. And hold your head high.”

  Had I even thought for a second that he would be having a mug shot taken, I would have said, “And don’t forget, no matter what they say to you, the media will get a hold of your mug shot, so don’t smile in it, because they don’t know yet that you aren’t guilty.” The same way he should have said to me, given the interview was in GQ, “No matter what they say to you, how covered you actually are, make sure you wear pants.” Word to the wise: PR people matter.

  I hung up and called Allison Van Laningham to tell her that they moved the hearing to the middle district, her neighborhood. My other lawyer beeped in. I told Allison that I needed to take the call; it was Mike Critchley, my criminal lawyer. Mike reminded me not to say a word and to refer all media to him. I said, “No worries there,” and told him that I had already told Rosemarie Terenzio, my publicist, to refer all calls to him. I called Allison back. She had the indictment and sent it to me. I read it immediately and couldn’t believe it! I was floored, happy, and outraged all at the same time. I really thought, after all this time, that they had to have something. I didn’t know what they could possibly have but I thought that after two-and-a-half years and millions of taxpayer dollars, they had to have something. But it seems like the whole case is hinged on Andrew Young’s statements.

  Maybe when it’s all said and done Andrew could pitch Mastercard for his own commercial: Used BMW for the boss’s mistress: $28,000. Rental house for her: $2,700 a month. OB/GYN bills: $2,500. Filling the house with furniture from Pottery Barn: $30,000. Using the boss’s mistress as your cover and lying to everyone about the money you solicited using his name but kept for yourself: Priceless.

  One evening in July Johnny called and said, “We have to have a hard conversation.”

  Graduation from her trike! On the indoor playground, 2011.

  “Okay,” I said, bracing myself. The physical tensing was because of the damage that’s happened over the past few years. Before this all happened, my natural reaction would have been to relax, let go on the inside, and breathe—not to tense up. That’s what damage does, among other things.

  Johnny went on to tell me that the three women he had told me about the first night I had met him were, in fact, not real and that he had made them up.

  I thought he was joking. “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “What?” I didn’t understand what he was saying.

  “I made them up. They aren’t real.”

  My mind was racing. How could that be? He had told me detail upon detail. I remembered the ups and downs of emotion I had felt the night he went to Chicago to break off his relationship there. I had experienced anger like no other. My reality within our relationship had just been ripped out from under me.

  Something I said on Oprah suddenly flashed in my head. She had asked, “How do you know he isn’t lying to you?”

  I replied, “He doesn’t lie to me. I know him like the back of my hand.”

  So I asked him straight
out, “Why would you do that?”

  He went on to tell me that it was a habit triggered by women when they hit on him. Apparently one that started decades ago when his first mistress expressed her plans to leave her husband for him. He didn’t want her to think that she was the only one or that he was ever going to leave Elizabeth. He wanted to keep control over the situation, keep her at bay, and his real feelings as well, I imagine.

  “So who was real and who wasn’t?”

  “The three I told you about the first night, the ones after 2004, were fiction. The ones before 2004 are real.”

  Well, no wonder the media never found ex-mistresses in Chicago, LA, or Florida. They didn’t exist.

  “So if Chicago wasn’t real, who owned the cell phone before the one I bought you?”

  “My second ex-mistress.”

  I thought about all the texts that I had read—they were all from her.

  “But why would you—on the first night—tell me about three women like that, right off the bat?”

  “I didn’t want you to think that you were special.”

  My mind was still spinning, thinking of all the things I would have done differently had I known this little tidbit of total fucking insanity! Excuse the judgment, but shit! I was mad at myself!

  “So here I was, thinking when you ran that you have so many smoking bombs since 2004, but I was the only one?”

  “Yes. You are the only one.”

  “And why did you wait so long to tell me this?”

  “I wanted to tell you in 2009, but Cooney told me not to tell you before you testified before the grand jury.”