Enquring minds - John Edwards & Rielle Hunter

When John Edwards didn’t win the Iowa caucuses in January, he knew his campaign for president was over. When I read that he was confronted by two National Enquirer reporters in the basement of the Beverly Hilton in the wee morning hours last Tuesday, I knew his career in public life was probably over, too. At the very least, he blew his chance to be Barack Obama’s running mate and the next vice president of these United States.

If you haven’t heard about this, you’re missing one of the most compelling storylines to come out of this endless campaign. According to Newsweek, a few years ago in NYC, John Edwards met a woman named Rielle Hunter in a bar. She’s an aspiring actress and filmmaker who, when she was known as Lisa Druck, dated author Jay McInerney and was the inspiration for the “ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious” Alison Poole character in his novel “Story of My Life.”

Maybe she showed John Edwards her reel, or maybe she showed him some of the tricks she learned partying her way around New York in the 80’s. Either way, he was allegedly moved to provide her with hundreds of thousands of dollars start-up money for a production company and a six-month contract to produce a series of webisodes documenting his presidential campaign back in 2006. He either truly believed in the skills of a filmmaker with one IMDB credit or he wanted her to be able to see how the other half lives in his “two Americas.” The bottom line is he cut her some serious checks.

Last fall, the story started to get strange. In September, the webisodes disappeared. By December, Rielle Hunter was pregnant and had relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina - living in a rented house in a the same gated community as Edwards’ associate Andrew Young and claiming that Young was the father of her baby. This was odd for a few reasons, not the least of which being that she has reportedly been a guest for dinner at his house with his wife and his three kids. Talk about awkward; I can just hear his wife asking, “Honey, do you plan to be there at the birth of your boss’ love child that you’re falsely claiming to be the father of?”

The baby has now been born and both mother and child have relocated (again) to Santa Barbara – so the checks are still coming from somewhere. That brings us to Monday of last week and the events that will be remembered as the ending of John Edwards’ political career. He was in town to join Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at a press event on dealing with homelessness on Monday afternoon. If the story is true and he is the father of her baby, this would serve as the perfect opportunity for Edwards, Hunter, and their illegitimate little bundle of joy to spend some quality time together. So she came down to L.A. with a friend of hers, a “facilitator” if you will, who had reserved two rooms in the hotel under his name (presumably for the purpose of secrecy). The National Enquirer reports that Edwards showed up around 9:45, avoided the lobby, went down some side stairs to the bottom floor, then caught the elevator. The facilitator waited in one room with the baby while Edwards and Hunter were alone in the other. Apparently they ventured out of the hotel together briefly, then went back inside. Sounds like a condom run to me, which is a lot like locking the barn door after the horses have all gotten out.

Edwards reappeared a little after 2:30 in the morning, but when he exited the elevator in the hotel basement, he was greeted by questions from waiting reporters. He ran up the stairs to the lobby, but spotted a photographer and headed back down to the basement where he ducked into a restroom and held the door shut until security came to escort him out. Security probably would have escorted the reporters out instead, but they were registered guests at the hotel. Ah, those brilliant tabloid journalists – they’ll get ya every time.

The kicker in this story is that on Monday night at the Beverly Hilton, the Television Critic’s Association was holding a press tour, so the place was crawling with producers, actors, and writers. The rooms reserved by the facilitator were actually down the hall from the TCA hospitality suite. So while John Edwards and Rielle Hunter were (allegedly) enjoying what amounts to a conjugal visit, they were (probably) making the beast with two backs a stone’s throw from some of the same actors and actresses who will end up reading for the parts of John Edwards and Rielle Hunter in the movie that will inevitably be made about them.