The Politician (42 page)

He asked what the “fuck” I wanted.

I said, “Nothing,” and stood up. Our faces were about a foot apart over the coffee table and I was ready to fight him right there. He told me to get the “fuck” out. I told him he could read about it in the newspapers.

I flung open the door and it hit the wall with a loud bang. I walked down to the elevator trying to make a dramatic exit. I could feel him nervously
looking at me as I pushed the call button. As I waited for the elevator, some of the drama drained out of the moment. Finally he walked down the hall and asked me to come back.

Afraid to leave things as they were, I went back to the room. In the tense first moments, he told me not to threaten him again. I told him not to “fucking” talk to me like that again.

We then had a much calmer discussion. He promised to stay in contact with me and not delay returning my calls. He also renewed his promise to help me in the long term by establishing the antipoverty organization with funds from Bunny Mellon where I would have a good job with health insurance and he could have a solid political platform.

Within twenty-four hours of our confrontation at the hotel in Georgetown, he went to see Bunny. During this visit he decided that he was setting his sights too low. Instead of $3 to $5 million, he now hoped to get as much as $50 million and her jet so he could circle the globe combating poverty. As a few more weeks passed, he had me contact her accountant, Kenneth Starr (not the same fellow who was involved in the Monica Lewinsky case), to see if the foundation was feasible. The senator and I discussed strategy in five different phone conversations. Following his plan, I created a nonprofit corporation for this project, which we called the New Heritage Education Foundation. I broached the topic with Starr, who thought a worldwide antipoverty effort headed by Bunny’s friend John Edwards would be an ideal way to honor her life.

Once he realized that this foundation could become a reality and provide him with a permanent role on the world stage, the senator pursued it with enthusiasm. After one meeting with Bunny, the senator told Bunny’s friend Bryan Huffman he could be on the board of the foundation and “do great things.” He then called me and left a voice mail saying, “Bunny loves me.” Another message he left me said:

Andrew, hey, it’s John. I had a wonderful conversation with . . . long and wonderful conversation with Bunny . . .
she will be there no matter what. She’s offered me to come up there and stay if I need to, and I may end up doing that some. Anyway, she’s a terrific person. . . . and I think we can completely count on her, and I just wanted you to hear that and to once again tell you I love you . . . I really love you, Andrew.

This call, and another voice mail in which he told me he was going to see Bunny to finalize arrangements for the foundation, gave me hope that the senator was finding a way to fulfill his promise that I would be employed into the future. I was also happy to be talking about something other than a secret girlfriend and his unacknowledged child. I shouldn’t have been so happy. Without someone to monitor them and clean up after them, Rielle and the senator wouldn’t be able to stay out of trouble for more than a few weeks.

W
ith Rielle Hunter gone and John Edwards focused on the upcoming Democratic National Convention, Cheri and I thought we could take a few days to start putting our lives back in order. The Santa Barbara lease was ending in early August. In anticipation, we flew east and dropped the kids in Illinois to stay with family, then traveled on to Raleigh. We spent a couple of days moving our things into storage and cleaning up. On top of all the other frustrations we felt, we were dealing with a house that my boss told me I could never move in to.

As we moved through the rental house and sorted things into boxes and rubbish that could be discarded, I came upon a box of trash that Rielle had left behind after she stayed with us for a few weeks at the very start of her life on the run. A few things lying on top of the cardboard and papers caught my eye. One was a sheaf of pages ripped out of a notebook with “The Slut Club” written on the top line and a list of thirty-four men’s names below.

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 would 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!”