Last year, this silly little gossip site was one of the few blather-outlets that stayed on top of the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter story during the three long weeks between the National Enquirer catching Edwards redhanded and his semi-quasi-anti-confession on Nightline. While every single “legitimate” news outlet either ignored the story or actively tried to suppress it, we were sorting through the lies and half-truths and mysteriously disappearing online information to figure out what was going on and why it was being covered up.
But the whole time we were trying to get to the bottom of it, there was one sad aspect of it that we skirted around: Elizabeth.
The woman is dying of cancer. On one hand, that’s one reason the story was and is such an outrage. John Edwards and the media were complicit in covering it up, using Elizabeth’s illness as cover. It really did fit the classic definition of chutzpah: The child who kills his own parents and then begs for the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan. Or in this case, the presidential candidate who has an affair on the campaign trail and starts another family behind the back of his terminally ill wife, and then demands privacy because his wife is dying.
But on the other hand, it was difficult to judge Elizabeth too harshly when it became unclear whether she was telling the whole truth about what she knew and when she knew it. It’s not her fault that any of this happened, and you can’t fault her for being loyal to her unloyal husband even in the face of such an unbelievable nightmare.
All of which is a caveat to this item about Elizabeth’s new book. The New York Daily News reports:
Elizabeth, 59, who is terminally ill with cancer, speaks in far more detail than before about her husband’s infidelity in her new memoir, “Resilience,” due to be published May 12 by Broadway Books. A copy was obtained by the Daily News.
Despite feeling deeply deceived, Elizabeth Edwards nonetheless publicly stood by her husband’s side, lending his candidacy the aura of a warm, loving family life.
But she had actually wanted him to quit the race to protect the family. Edwards admitted the hanky-panky to her days after declaring his candidacy in 2006 – almost a year before the National Enquirer reported it.
She was afraid of the destructive questions Edwards’ affair with videographer Rielle Hunter would raise.
Later events proved her right. “He should not have run,” she says.
This corroborates John Edwards’ claim on Nightline that he’d told his family about it in 2006. There was some question about that, because of a photo of an Edwards campaign rally on Dec. 30, 2006 where Elizabeth and Rielle were just a few feet away from each other. At the time that photo was discovered, just a week after Edwards’ Nightline appearance, it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth could’ve possibly put up with Rielle’s presence in the campaign if she knew what was going on. How could she smile and wave and shake hands while she knew her husband’s mistress was attached to him at the hip?
But in hindsight… it’s plausible. Maybe Elizabeth thought she was doing what she needed to do to support her husband. Maybe she thought exposing his betrayal wasn’t worth ruining his chances for the presidency. She wanted him to quit, but he wouldn’t, so she stood by him. Now that she has committed to print the claim that she really did know about the affair when John says she knew about it, then apparently that’s the way it was.
And even if you still don’t buy it: Can you blame her for saying so?
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One source stated she wanted him to quit and he “ignored her” which seems really plausible since he took The Mistress on his presidential anouncement tour instead of his family. I like that she wouldn’t use her name in the book. This way Elizabeth put her in the catagory of nonexistance. Too bad her husband doesn’t disappear too.
I love how she called Rielle a “groupie.”
Ooooh, Happy Camper. Good point. Yikes. John is such a scum bag.
Scum bag indeed. Regardless of the veracity of the biography, Elizabeth Edwards will leave this world with her head held high.
Ugh. Imagine being Rielle Hunter, getting your freak on, and realizing you have no way of getting your freak OFF.
Ugh.
That is one hell of a formidable woman. I would have loved to see what would happen to John and Rielle if she weren’t ill.
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I know this comment had nothing to do with anything but Beige’s comment had me in stitches. Stitch, stitch, stitch . . .
Elizabeth – class.
Rielle – no class whatsoever.
Elizabeth Edwards is a better woman than me……..I’d have planted my size 8 foot right into the crack of his idiocy.
Who is supporting Rielle and her child? One look at the kid and you know she’s John’s daughter.
I really feel for the Edwards children. The one decent parent they have is dying, leaving them with Senor Douchebag.
The mistress and Johnny have a problem with a grandjury. If there is justice he’ll go to jail for campaign finance violations and she’ll go to jail for income tax evasion. Imagine the government allowing someone to get hush money and not claim the income. 15000 a month for spending money and 6-7,000 a month for rent. Didn’t they get Al Capone for living beyond his means with no visible way to pay for it? Like a job. The bad thing is, I think you can go to jail longer for income tax evasion than you can for campaign finance violations. I guess the lawyers involved didn’t tell the mistress because they didn’t want her to declare where her income came from and leave a paper trail. RH that’s what you get for trusting the douchebag(s). Poor baby she didn’t deserve her parents either.
I’d have done the same thing, Koka. I am not that classy when people treat me badly and that’s if everything else is going well. I have all the respect in the world for Elizabeth Edwards.
May be she is telling the truth and really did know about the affair since 2006. Or may be she didn’t want to alienate her husband by not corroborating his story in her book…She seems to have forgiven him, she has reconciled with him and I think she wants it to remain that way. I think it’s admirable that she managed to forgive him, most people probably wouldn’t be able to.
Shout out to Deceiver from the Enquirer? I think it may be.
I too, would have handled all this in a far less classys manner than Elizabeth has, particularly if I had a terminal illness. How unbelievably cold does one have to be to betray a dying person that loves you. Betrayal is bad enough without that complication.
My big mouth would have been yellin’ at him for the last 2 years. I would have gotten a hold of her too and made a public display of her. Elizabeth is way more classy than I am.
This maybe changing the subject a bit but Jay McInerney’s book “How it Ended” has been released. It is a collection of 26 short stories he has written over his career. Last night, I read the two short stories where Rielle Hunter is portrayed as Alison Poole. The short story “Penolope at the Pond” tells how Alison(RH) met Tom Phillips(JRE) and that it was “Love at first sight for both of them”. According to Alison, Tom chased after her, asking for her phone number, then called her an hour later to his hotel room where he told her “Your hot”. It tells some tidbits I don’t want to give away in case any of you are planning to read Jay’s book. When I read yesterday that EE said “John fell for the “Your Hot”line, I’m thinking he still hasn’t told EE the whole truth about his relationship with RH. He’s just plain scum and EE one classy lady.
i’m bummed john didn’t get deceiver of the year. still bummed!
Had my husband done this to my kids and me, I’d probably be living out my last days in solitary confinement.
ELizabeth=class
Johnny boy=useless scumbag
I still think she should leave him and take all of his money with her. Let her live the rest of her life in the lap of luxery while he gets to live in a dump that he deserves.
Sorry guys, I’ve got to seriously disagree with the whole Classy Lizzie theory.
Class would be to quietly divorce the man, taking most of his wealth with you, to insure your children’s financial security.
Class would be quietly living out your final days spending every last moment with your children, giving them as much normal as you can manage before you die and rip their lives apart.
Class is not hanging your husband’s dirty underwear out there for the world to read.
Class is not doing the whole book tour publicity circuit.
Class is not serving yourself up as the martyr for royalties.
Class is not leaving your children with a well publicized, thoroughly documented legacy of a selfish philandering father. (I realize that John did this all on his own, but as soon as Elizabeth wrote paragraph one of this book, she took on an equal responsibility for John’s public image.)
Class is quiet, private, and dignified.
This book proves that Lizzy ain’t got it.
Minnow – Now, to your post I have to agree. I guess I should have said that she has more class than Johnnyboy, but not enough to be completely classy. I still stand by my point that she should take all of his money so that he can no longer afford $450 haircuts.
Rielle Hunter has got to be livid. A disgusting, pathetic groupie?
Rielle Hunter’s book is the one I will buy.
If she hasn’t gotten a book deal by now, it won’t be happening. Rielle Hunter is waiting for Johnny boy to make good on his promises to her in the future – remember he’s her “love lips”.
I believe Elizabeth is a classey lady, but, she deserves to be able to drag Johnny Boy and his well worn piece of ass all over the front pages. I believe in revenge. Beige, I to would need solitary too. BTW, that was funny.
RH won’t need money when the Feds put her in jail for income tax evasion. She better shut up. They will look at everything she writes and everything she says for evidence. She may be stupid enough to give it to them. So go ahead and write that book. Maybe she can explain where she got her money in it. If Johnny Boy is smart he’ll shut her up. She said she was sure the taxes had been paid on the money. Yes, Fred paid his. She needed to disclose and pay her’s.
I went through Nad Boy’s campaign finance disclosures on the website. He wrote a lot of checks to Fred Barons and Andrew Young.(They were reasonably regular checks to both. (18,000 to 100,000) If there is a explanation I didn’t see it. The month the baby was born there was a check to Fred Barons for around 57,000. That would pay a lot of medical bills. I never did buy that another person would pay out somewhere around 300,000 to cover a whore chasing man’s ass.
Of course, unless it was his own. (sorry I didn’t finish the sentence.
You know what, Minnow? You are absolutely right.
Minnow, you’re right, E’s classiness slipped somewhat by writing a book and making noise about it all.
With that said, E is still classier than I would be….I’d be shrieking it from the rooftops just to make J look bad and make R look like the homewrecker she is. But then, I’m not fighting cancer and trying to keep my life as stress-free as possible………and I am not married to a hairy nutbag either.
No woman would have permitted her husband’s lover to remain on the campaign after he had confessed, and even fewer would have consented to appear with him while she was around. I think EE is lying about when she knew about Rielle in order to make herself sound like less of a chump and her husband sound like less of a bastard. She probably found out about Rielle around the same time that the rest of us did.
I believe je got caught and had to tell her. Either EE or je took those Vids down. It was like the PAC blog went down one day and appeared again without the Vids when the blog went up as a campaign blog. I remember the Vids weren’t up long. They were really squirley by the way. rh documented their affair, not the campaign. je may have taken them down when he or his staff realized what was going on. You can’t tell me staff didn’t know. I’ve worked in hospitals for years. We all know whose doing who and we weren’t in such close quarters and these people were, so the staffers need to give up their fake shock. They probably enabled some of it.
Elizabeth may or may not have known when the three of them were at the same event, but if she know why did she allow the mistress to go on the announcement tour. There are u-tube of the two of them in Iowa without family and wife but with mistress. It may not have been a long tour I don’t remember. Why leave your family at home and take your mistress? May be EE knew and wouldn’t go. Maybe EE knew rh would be gone on 12-31 so she waited it out. We will have to wait for the book. Remember we all clean up our act in hind site.
Minnow –
I still disagree. If I were a woman dying of cancer left with two small children while my husband not only campaigned instead of stayed with me and banged some floozy on the side, there’s going to be understandable resentment there. I can’t fault her there, nor can I fault her for wanting to make it clear that he was not the pious family man he campaigned to be. If she can shed light on an ugly truth for the sake of those who believed that lie, fine by me.
She already goes so far above how I’d act, too, that I cannot fault her lest I be a hypocrite. I’ve been cheated on without cancer or children in a non-marriage, and I responded in such a way that is much less classy. I certainly told anyone who was interested in it. She’s merely doing the same.
FYI – I read last night that EE’s interview with Oprah has moved from Monday, May 11 to Thursday, May 7. Also, her book is being release the end of this week instead of May 12.
Jay McInerney dated Rielle Hunter back in the late 80’s and wrote a novel using RH as the main character named “Alison Poole”. He has released a new book which is a collection of short stories and two of the stories in this book are of the Alison Poole character. I read the two short stories over the weekend.
The story “Penolope on the Pond” tells of Alison (RH) meeting “Tom” (JRE) a southern presidential candidate and about their relationship which was not a brief fling but she followed him on the campaign trail even after she had been fired from the campaign. The word got out that Alison and Tom were caught by a campaign staffer in a compromising situation and a blogger starts questioning Tom about the rumor of an affair with his former media consultant, Alison.
McInerney used the “You are so Hot” line to describe the first meeting between Alison and Tom but Jay’s version has Tom chasing after Alison, asking for her phone # and the first encounter in Tom’s hotel room. This short story makes Tom look like an insecure lovesick pathetic man who is using a friend to cover up the affair. Alison believed Tom would divorce his wife whether he is elected president or not. I’m quoting from the story “she couldn’t help wondering if he would remember it, out of all the hundred of hotel rooms that year, as the place where he traded his soulmate for something he loved more.”
I realize this is a fictional story but just maybe RH used McInerney to “tell” her side of the story. Maybe JRE really did find himself in “love” with this woman but lied to EE and the press to cover up the fact he never ended the affair. It makes me feel all the more sad for EE and I hope she has those around her whom truly love her.
It’s not that I don’t understand Lizzie’s resentment, Anni. I’m just pointing out that the first half of this thread was a deification of Mrs. Edwards in a way that she really doesn’t merit.
Nobody deserves a godhead simply because they married a complete jerk.
Class is defined as being of high quality, integrity, or style.
Now, as much as I dislike the whole Jackie Kennedy mystique, she was a lady in a comparable situation to Elizabeth Edwards. And Jacqueline had class coming out her wazoo.
JFK lived the lifestyle John Edwards dreams of (minus the bullet). Kennedy sat at the control panel of the world’s biggest superpower, with an endless supply of limber Hollywood starlettes, a cabinet full of drugs, and a press happily covering his ass. Johnny wants to be John in the worst way.
Have you read the Jackie tell-all book?
Did you catch the Barbara Walters interview? The Oprah appearance? The cover Vanity Fair?
What, she wasn’t trodden upon enough?
So what’s the difference?
Class.
Pure quality, integrity, and style. Class.
Elizabeth has what? Months or years left? Precious few moments, to be sure. And she’s spending them yelling into the wind? What kind of woman wastes valuable time trying to convince us that her no-good-cheatin’-lyin’-spit-for-brains-pox-riddled husband is kind of a creepy guy?
Hell, we already know that.
So what’s she doing then?
Why the book?
Don’t tell me it’s to inspire other terminally cancer stricken wives of metrosexual southern politicians with helmet hair that they too can rise the bondage of infidelity and STDs with a song in their heart. ‘Cuz that market’s sorta small.
This is vanity. This is mud slinging. This is rubbing John’s face in Rielle’s overflowing Diaper Genie.
The anthesis of class.
You can be angry, you can be stunned, hurt, and violated, with eyes aflame like Hera herself, and still remain classy.
But it’s pretty damn hard to do that on a book tour.
Rielle gave birth in late February 2008 I believe. The baby must have been conceived in June or July of 2007 — six months or so after John Edwards allegedly confessed to Elizabeth about the affair, and after Elizabeth’s cancer returned. Did John go back to Rielle after confessing to Elizabeth about the affair in 2006 and after the cancer returned? Did John have to confess to the affair twice to Elizabeth?
detante, You guessed it.
What’s been leaked from EE’s book so far by the press is, EE said “He didn’t tell the whole truth when he first told her about the affair – “he said it was one time with Rielle”. Hopefully, JRE has told EE the whole ugly truth of his stupid affair and the little girl. He’s such a loser. Personally, I hope both JRE and RH do jail time. Maybe I shouldn’t be so critical as wishing bad luck but EE deserves to lose the scumbag.
It’s starting to look like JE bullied EE into this campaign and gave her needs no thought at all. He needed this campaign to keep his affair going, after all banging a presidential candidate it “hot”. Banging a nothing “good ol’ boy” isn’t. He needed to take her on his announcement tour and she needed to pretend she was the future 1st lady. I would like EE to shed some light on why she and the kids weren’t with him and “the mistress was.
How delusional do you have to be to believe JE would divorce EE once in the Whitehouse.(this isn’t France) Look at what they did to Rachel Jackson and all she did was to forget to divorce her 1st husband before she married ol’ Andy. BTW, Rachel was so distraught she died before Andy took office. But who would expect a mistress to read? Jennifer Flowers believed this and how did it work out for her?
How delusional do you have to be to run for president with a mistress instead of your wife and family? Johnny boy needs some serious psychiatric help. He’s probably needed it since his son died and for sure since EE became ill.
Happy Camper said, “How delusional do you have to be to run for president with a mistress instead of your wife and family?”
I’m continually amazed at what public figures think they can get away with, even though they must know that it’ll come out eventually. Look at Eliot Spitzer, for pete’s sake.
After reading the excerpts of EE’s interview with Oprah, I’m disappointed in EE. She’s basically given JRE a pass on the whole affair (blaming RH) and doesn’t want to address whether JRE is the father of RH’s daughter. Appears to me the whole purpose of her book is to write history “the affair” in a certain way to make JRE look better than he deserves.