THE ANTIDOTE TO HUBRIS
Rielle Hunter: Johnny Edwards’ ‘Perfect Storm’
SIX YEARS AFTER SHE SWOONED OVER MEETING “Johnny” Edwards in the flesh, it’s ever more clear that Rielle Hunter was the perfect storm to capsize the senator.
“We are a family, but as of the end of last week, John Edwards and I are no longer a couple,” Hunter said this morning on Good Morning America, six years after the two began a destructive affair that would ruins lives and careers. “For me, for my part in it, it’s because I’m no longer interested in hiding … hiding our relationship … not living out.”
The damage has long been done.
The rich and handsome Democratic presidential candidate had been used to calling the shots. He had had a wildly successful legal career, followed by a single six-year-term in Congress. He quickly developed presidential ambitions and began campaigning for the job in 2003. His blue collar roots gave him bonafides among Southern Democrats, while his good looks bestowed good will on him from strangers. But a revealing video leaked online showed Edwards was a bit too preoccupied with his good looks and suggested a vanity that would make him susceptible to flattery and — ergo — a predatory Hunter.
Though Edwards was married with three children (a fourth child, a son named Wade, died earlier), being married wasn’t enough to deter Hunter from hooking up with the Senator on the same day they met. “You are so hot!,” she declared when she met him in the lobby of the New York Regency Hotel in February 2006.
And everything that followed — a secret affair, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, illegitimate child, public shame, withdrawal from campaign, marital separation, criminal prosecution — was the result of the selfish and narcissistic natures of Hunter and Edwards.
Hunter makes the shocking claim that her tell-all book, What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter and Me, was written for her her 4-year-old daughter, Frances Quinn. But that’s a lie: the book was written to settle scores and further promote her own delusional storyline of the now-dead Elizabeth Edwards as culprint and “Johnny” Edwards as victim. And it further imprints shame on the little girl she professes to live.
And now Hunter says the two are kaput, that she refuses to continue to live in the shadows. “”We decided together to end it. It’s hard. It’s painful,” Hunter said this morning.” Her work is finished here.
