Sleazy new outrages:
• Weeks after they first hooked up in 2006, Edwards arranged for Hunter to show up at a mall where he was shopping with his young kids so she could meet them.
• He brought her to his family’s Georgetown home, “but we didn’t stay in the master bedroom. I thought that would be way too weird.”
Surprise moments of self-awareness:
• “The problem with our relationship is pretty obvious: someone who is living a life devoted to spiritual truth is probably not going to be the best mistress. ... I never read any mistress handbooks, and therefore didn’t realize how important it is ... to keep your mouth shut!”
• “John Edwards ... believed what people were saying to be true, because he wanted it to be true. ... He really believed he was the savior, the golden boy for the Democratic party. People told him that all day long. His wife. People he paid. People he met on the street.”
Pathetic excuses:
• Edwards’s “lying about women” wasn’t malicious, “it’s actually very understandable behavior from a passive-aggressive man ... that never learned how to express his feelings.”
• That sex tape was his idea, when they were both “sleep-deprived” on an overseas trip, and she was not pregnant when they filmed it, and anyone who says she looked pregnant is lying.
• Hunter recalls how Andrew Young, who later trashed her in his book, once “got very vocal about how he was not interested in going home. Apparently his wife was very b-----.”
• Hunter reprints lengthy suck-up e-mails from then-Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman, who she believes later burned her in a story.
• Hunter mocks the 27-year-old campaign staffer Josh Brumberger who got fired after he raised concerns about the affair: “Did Josh really think that he would be the chosen one?”
Genuine hilarity:
• In summer 2007, “I saw Johnny for two nights and he had never been sweeter to me. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, he should renew his vows more often!’”
Hunter and Edwards on the campaign trail in 2006, in a photo first published in the National Enquirer. (National Enquirer via AP)
• After reconnecting with Edwards when he separated from his wife (evidenced by many, many recent photos of them as a family group with daughter Quinn, now 4), Hunter was frustrated that they couldn’t recapture their old spark. “I began requesting couples therapy. .... I was met with many ‘maybe, if I don’t get indicted’-type responses.” So she broke up with him. After he mended his ways, she agreed to take him back — a full 24 hours later.
Read also: The TV Column: Ladies of “The View” grill Rielle Hunter
Read earlier: Rielle Hunter tells all — again! Grading the revelations in new book by John Edwards mistress, 6/18/12
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