I couldn’t imagine I was, given I was 43 and had never been pregnant. Johnny and I never used birth control, but I was always mindful of my cycle and I was certain that I had never been ovulating during any of my visits with Johnny. [...] I discovered (to my shock and surprise) that most women were at their most fertile not during ovulation, but a few days before. IMPORTANT INFORMATION that I did not know! – Buzzfeed
RIELLE HUNTER has written a book, which was published Tuesday and it turns out she’s an ignoramus. After reading excerpts of her book on Buzzfeed it’s not hard to understand why John Edwards and Hunter broker off their love affair just last week, according to Hunter in interviews. What’s now been revealed inside What Really Happened would be embarrassing to face every day in each other.
Rielle Hunter unloading in print hits John Edwards where it hurts, while she spares herself no dignity, because it sounds like the publisher pushed her to write all the gory details to the exhausting humiliation of them both. Summer publishing is that way. You want to give people smut-like pleasure while they’re baking in the hot, warm sun.
It’s why the phenomenal 50 Shades of Grey is stacked in piles at Costco right now.
In the video above on “The View,” which followed the “20/20″ interview with Chris Cuomo, Whoopie Goldberg focuses on Hunter talking about Elizabeth Edwards. Hunter evidently unpacks the Edwardses marriage, which she claims was finished long before John Edwards and she started their affair that was by no means the only extra-marital relationship John Edwards was navigating.
It’s always a puzzlement why couples who aren’t able to be happy together in peace choose to stay together when the cumulative affect on everyone is a total train wreck. Where did the storybook coupling fall apart? Was it when they lost their teenage son in the tragic car wreck, which Elizabeth Edwards spoke about in a way that broke your heart, her pain so understandingly overwhelming? Was it when she and John decided to have more children after their son Wade died?
Edwards never returned to lawyering. Instead, she began hormone treatments in hopes of conceiving more children. The couple felt that would be the best way to bring joy back into their home, for themselves and grieving daughter Cate. – MSNBC
In the scheme of politics it hardly matters anymore, except what John Edwards’ “Two America” might have meant if he had been truly committed to it above his own starved ego in the age of “Occupy.” However, even that is obliterated by the sheer rawness of the Edwardses ambition, both John and Elizabeth partners in what became a spectacle, because they both actually believed the presidency or some piece of leftover fame they could wrestle out of their road show was worth the annihilation of everyone around them, including devoted Americans caught up yet again in another celebrity political game, only to be sandbagged.
Add the human interest story of a man and woman who appeared as if they had everything, but were obviously devouring each other and everyone around them because they couldn’t face their own pain or let go of each other, it teaches that kids or not, when tragedy strikes there’s no way to soothe the grief that sometimes extinguishes the love because of the pain between you. It’s over when it’s over and to not come to grips with endings as a possibility to begin again opens on an outcome that might not just be deadly for the adults, but ruin the the lives of everyone involved, including the innocent.
The National Enquirer got the story right from the start, with no one in traditional or new media having the stomach for the truths that could only be found by following the characters in the story relentlessly; Mark Halperin and John Heilemann did the same and got grief for it, too. There’s a lesson here, but don’t expect anyone to learn it. Political writers must write the stories they see and feel are important, with editors squeamishness fought, because only the truth will set us free, even if everyone today comes prepared with their own facts. That it took the fictional character of Will McAvoy in HBO’s “The Newsroom” to say that loud enough for everyone to hear reveals the rot in our politics today, with the Edwardses-Hunter-Mellon-Young saga only one small chapter of an ongoing series.
Everyone in this sorry human tragedy came out ravaged. I don’t know how the eldest daughter Kate will ever make peace with it all, but if she does it’s a miracle. To be old enough to experience such carnage in your family is life-altering, taking a lifetime to exorcise in order to save yourself and capture happiness in place of the madness brought on by parents who were mindlessly self-destructive.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but sometimes they are rendered to black and white. It’s often the best that can be expected and can be enough if you see the magnificence of life lived in the only moment any of us have, which is now.
Rielle Hunter got all her information on the state of the Edwards marriage from John Edwards. Maybe she never learned in life that married men who cheat tell their girlfriends lies about their wives. Maybe she did not consider that John Edwards has a pretty big track record of telling whoppers. But the rest of us ought to know better. If anyone wants to know the truth about Elizabeth Edwards, read the books Elizabeth Edwards wrote. I knew Elizabeth Edwards, and she was a pretty great person. If people want to buy this book and help Rielle earn royalty money, for goodness sake consider the source of the tales you will be reading.
“I knew Elizabeth Edwards, and she was a pretty great person.”
While I feel sympathy for this tragic figure she was complicit in almost foisting this snake oil salesman on America….THAT is a stain on her name no amount of time will erase.
Agreed. This John Edwards is the Devil, Elizabeth Was a Saint crap is getting really old, really fast. FDR screwed around on his wife, and was probably the greatest President we ever had. I just DONT CARE ABOUT THIS ANYMORE, and in fact NEVER DID.
Edwards could have been a great Progressive President. He’s not a criminal or evil because he had an affair. As for Elizabeth, you don’t automatically become a Saint when you die. Let’s move on, PLEASE.
Hunter was pursuing JE before he uttered his first lie. He was just “lucky” that she did not do “Fatal Attraction IRL” on him. The staff knew she was nothing but trouble the nanosecond they laid eyes on her. She screamed “Bimbo Airhead Celebrity Obsessed Fan” to the roof-tops. She was out to “score” Edwards and the staff knew it. JE bedded her in hours; the rest is history. What JE may or may not have said about his relationship with EE to Hunter was most likely besides the point. It was all about shared narcissism and pheromones with JE and RH.
I think of this as an unreliable observer interpreting suspect data.
BettyH 27 June 2012 at 11:44 am
I appreciate you taking the time to stop by to comment.
I’m reminded of a quote I use in the beginning of my book, The Hillary Effect, which comes from Robert Evans and is taken from the 1994 movie on his life, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” which I heartily recommend:
Looks like Greek Tragedies are still being written.
Looks more like low comedy to me Sec. Looks like a terrible awful farce about two incredibly narcissistic people plus the brittle woman who had the mother of all wrecking balls hit her square in the face.
We reveal our true selves under pressure and neither Edwards was able to cope when tragedy struck. They were dysfunctional right to the bitter end with E.E. spending the very last years of her life twisting the knife in her ne’er-do-well husband’s side via a book.
Absolutely, sech.
Well I hope Reilly enjoys the last fleeting seconds of her fame. I hope she feels that it was worth the degradation she just unloaded on herself. May she now sink into the primordial ooze from which she came, and quickly drop away from view. The sooner she settles on the “Z” list (ei “what ever happened to …”) the happier I will be.
TM
Sounds like the book will sell like hot-cakes; perfect summer fair– sleazy, salacious, decadent, chock full of slime and stupidity, a guilty pleasure.
For the sake of Miss Hunter’s daughter, I hope she makes a bundle.
John Edwards net worth is estimated at $29.5 – $55.0 million dollars. The kid will be taken care of.
Good grief.
Anyway, on the larger point of the article, such as it is, I suspect that the death of their child certainly hurt the Edwards’ marriage. Whether it actually broke it, only two people really can say, and one of them is dead. The strain of the recurring cancer might not have done it in, if it weren’t for that earlier tragedy. Or, it might have been entirely due to John’s own flaws, or just his mid-life crisis.
Good grief, indeed, Cujo359.
What women don’t know about their mid-40s would fill the Library of Congress.
Relationships are a fascinating microscope into the modern mania that we all navigate and over the course of 20 years I’ve found men incredibly receptive to talking about these topics, which at one time only had the woman’s voice.
As a student of these things I appreciate you weighing in on one of the most public displays of private, political and financial duplicity that we’ve seen play out in modern times.
Taylor you hit on my theory with this quote….”Edwards never returned to lawyering. Instead, she began hormone treatments in hopes of conceiving more children. The couple felt that would be the best way to bring joy back into their home, for themselves and grieving daughter Cate.” – MSNBC
I think this basically immature response to the loss of their son started the decline of Elizabeth Edwards. Beyond being morally irresponsible in my opinion to have children this late in life., adding hormone therapy to a women entering monopause can just ruin them harmonally speaking. What a hormonal stew can do to a women’s personality and emotions is over the moon. Not to mention that it could have triggered cancer.It most definately added to her weight troubles.
I agree that Elizabeth remained immature in her emotional responses to their break up to the bitter end. How very sad for her children.
All the above being said, I still believe whatever substance John Edwards had to his two americas came from her. She was the brains and the heart in his campaign, he was a pretty boy sharpie.
Everybody has met a Reille Hunter…we can spot them a mile away…he could too.