The Politician (33 page)

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 enough (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.”