SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/sen_john_e...celebrity/65193

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!



Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina - whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer -- met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 - and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn't leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER broke the story of Edwards' love child scandal last year, when Rielle was still pregnant and Edwards was still considered a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Both parties denied the NATIONAL ENQUIRER report and a close friend of Edwards' came forward and said he was the father of Rielle's baby. But sources told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER a far different story - they revealed that Edwards was engineering a massive cover up of his shocking infidelity.

Sources came forward after that story appeared and told The NATIONAL ENQUIRER that Edwards and Rielle had met secretly several times, so that he could see his baby and continue his relationship with Rielle.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER learned ahead of time that one such meeting was set for yesterday.

At 9:45 p.m. (PST) Monday, Edwards appeared at the hotel, and was dropped off at a side entrance. NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporter Alan Butterfield witnessed the ex-senator get out of a BMW driven by a male companion and stroll into the hotel.

Said Butterfield: "Edwards was not carrying anything. He walked in alone. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was looking around nervously before he entered the hotel.

"Once inside, he interestingly bypassed the lobby and ducked down a side stairs to go to the bottom floor to catch the elevator up - rather than taking the elevator in the main lobby. He went out of his way not to be seen."

Meanwhile, Rielle had reserved rooms 246 and 252 under the name of the friend who had accompanied her from Santa Barbara, Bob McGovern. Rielle was in one room and McGovern was in another with her baby. This allowed her and Edwards to spend time alone, a source revealed.

Edwards went out of the hotel briefly with Rielle, they were observed by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER and then went back to her room, where he stayed until attempting to sneak out of the hotel unseen at 2:40 a.m. (PST). But when he emerged alone from an elevator into the hotel basement he was greeted by several reporters from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

Senior NATIONAL ENQUIRER Reporter Alexander Hitchen asked Edwards why he was visiting Rielle and whether he was ready to confirm that he was the father of her baby.

Shocked to see a reporter, and without saying anything, Edwards ran up the stairs leading from the hotel basement to the lobby. But, spotting a photographer, he doubled back into the basement. As he emerged from the stairwell, reporter Butterfield questioned him about his hookup with Rielle.

Edwards did not answer and then ran into a nearby restroom. He stayed inside for about 15 minutes, refusing to answer questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER about what he was doing in the hotel. A group of hotel security men eventually escorted him from the men's room, while preventing the NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporters from following him out of the hotel.

Said reporter Hitchen: "After we confronted him about seeing Rielle, Edwards looked like a deer caught in headlights!

"He was clearly surprised that we had caught him at this very late hour inside the hotel.

"Some guests up at this late hour watched the spectacle in amusement from a staircase nearby."

Meanwhile, Rielle's friend McGovern also refused to answer any questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER or offer any explanation for her meeting with Edwards.

The Edwards "love child" scandal drew international press attention after the NATIONAL ENQUIRER published a blockbuster investigation about the politician in our Dec. 31, 2007 print edition.

We reported that Rielle, a woman linked to Edwards in a cheating scandal earlier last year, was more than six months pregnant - and we reported that she told a close confidante that Edwards was the father of her baby!

Edwards denied the affair and that he was the father, and in a bizarre twist, a close friend of his, Andrew Young, said he was the father. Young, 41, was married at the time with three children. The NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned he still is married.

Sources told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER exclusively that Edwards had engineered a massive cover up of the affair and love child scandal and that Young was taking the blame for his good friend. At the time Rielle had been relocated from the New York area to Chapel Hill in Edwards' home state of North Carolina, where she was living in an upscale gated community down the street from Young. Strangely, Young even had Rielle to his house for dinner with his wife and kids, the NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned.

Young has been extremely close to Edwards for years and was a key official in his presidential campaign.

Rielle is a self-described filmmaker whose company was hired by a pro-Edwards group called One America Committee. She was paid $114,000 to produce videos for Edwards' campaign and worked with him on those videos.

After our story last December, reporters from other media outlets asked Edwards about the report during a campaign stop in Columbia, S.C.

Edwards responded: "The story is false. It's completely untrue, ridiculous," adding: "Anyone who knows me knows that I have been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years."

Rielle issued her own statement, saying in part: "The innuendos and lies that have appeared on the Internet and in the NATIONAL ENQUIRER concerning John Edwards are not true, completely unfounded and ridiculous."

But a source told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER: "Now that it seems to have blown wide open, Rielle may get her wish - all she wants is for John to marry her and for them to live happily ever after with their baby. She's tired of running and living a lie."

A representative for Rielle had no comment on last night's meeting with Edwards.

 

The Enquirer headline is all in caps. I just pasted it here.

The Enquirer isn't wrong all the time

The other benefit of a hooker is she won't call you the next day wondering why you left in the middle of the night or asking when she can see you again.

 

And he wants to be the Attorney General.....

 

slate.com? WTF?

http://www.slate.com/id/2195869/

Why the Press Is Ignoring the Edwards "Love Child" Story
A double standard is at work.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, July 23, 2008, at 7:31 PM ET

Everybody had a good laugh last August when Roll Call broke the story about Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, getting arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for playing footsies in a toilet stall. The late-night talk show hosts mined the material for days; Slate produced a re-enactment of the bathroom ballet; and newspapers, magazines, and cable channels shredded Craig.

The angle taken by most reporters and commentators wasn't that Craig's restroom conduct was particularly shameful. The press doesn't object to same-sex sex at all, nor should it. Craig's true offense, said the press and the clowns, was hypocrisy, which they consider an inexcusable crime. Craig had supported both federal and Idaho bans on same-sex marriage, had opposed hate crime legislation that would extend protections to gays, and had earned a perfect 0 rating (PDF) from the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobby. And he had denied and denied any and all gayness while trying to recruit some action in a bathroom!

Although the Craig story and the John Edwards story, currently unfolding thanks to the National Enquirer, aren't directly analogous, they have a bit in common. Edwards, too, may be a sex hypocrite. The tabloid called Edwards a cheater last October and the father of a love child in December, and last night the Enquirer posted a story about Edwards' visit to his alleged mistress and child at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night.

When the original Enquirer story about the affair with Rielle Hunter came out, Edwards categorically denied the relationship, stating: "The story is false. It's completely untrue, ridiculous." As he rejected the Enquirer's charges, Edwards was making his wife and their marriage a central component of his campaign. If Edwards had had no affair, he wasn't a hypocrite, not then and not now.

But if Edwards had an affair and lied about it, shouldn't he suffer scrutiny akin to that of Craig? At least three-dozen daily newspapers in the United States published the Craig news the day after the Roll Call scoop, according to Nexis, but this morning not a single U.S. daily mentioned the Enquirer piece.

Now, as I've already said, the two stories aren't completely analogous. A cop charged Craig with a misdemeanor, and he pleaded guilty. There's no denying the police blotter is always news, and there's no denying that Craig deserved the hypocrisy scrutiny. Edwards, as far as we know, is guilty of nothing beyond running away from tabloid reporters in a Beverly Hills hotel stairway in the wee a.m. after visiting a female friend in her room. Also, all of the Enquirer's published "evidence" of an Edwards affair comes from unnamed sources. And I should mention that an Edwards political operative, Andrew Young, claims that he is the father of Hunter's child. (Young is married with children of his own.)

Yet, if the press craves consistency, it owes its readers some sort of assessment of Edwards. Is he, like Craig, a public hypocrite? Edwards is still very much a public figure. As Drudge notes today on his site, as recently as June the Associated Press reported that he was a vice presidential short-lister.

If Edwards had no affair and fathered no love child, it should be easy to erase the hypocrisy charge, and the press owes him that, pronto. If we give Edwards the benefit of the doubt, which he deserves, visiting the woman who recently gave birth to the out-of-wedlock child of a married campaign aide is completely OK. But meeting her at a Beverly Hills hotel in the early hours of the morning and running from tabloid reporters when approached and hiding in a hotel bathroom for 15 minutes, as the Enquirer reports Edwards did, is not completely OK. Not if he wants to avoid the hypocrite label.

So why hasn't the press commented on the story yet? Is it because it broke too late yesterday afternoon, and news organizations want to investigate it for themselves before writing about it? Or are they observing a double standard that says homo-hypocrisy is indefensible but that hetero-hypocrisy deserves an automatic bye?

That's my sense. Consider how the press treated Jesse Jackson when he admitted to having fathered a daughter outside of his marriage. The baby arrived in 1999, but Jackson didn't go public about it until 2001, after the National Enquirer scheduled its story about the little girl and her mother. Jackson, who loves preaching to others about their morality, suffered less than two seconds of opprobrium from the press after his admission.

It's hard to top Jackson for hypocrisy. In late 1998, while Karin Stanford was carrying the reverend's child, the two visited President Bill Clinton in the White House. Bill was "recovering" from the Lewinsky scandal, and Jesse was there to "counsel" him.

******

The most recent Enquirer story reads like a treatment for a screwball comedy, with Cary Grant playing the role of Edwards. Who should play Hunter? Young? The Enquirer reporters? Send casting suggestions to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Edwards in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

The Enquirer's actually had its moments, but I am laughing at this because it is the Enquirer.

Tough break for Edwards getting smeared like this.

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5441195&page=1

Edwards Admits Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate
In an ABC NEWS NIGHTLINE interview, Edwards Reveals He Cheated, But Didn't Father Child
By RHONDA SCHWARTZ and BRIAN ROSS

August 8, 2008 —

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extramarital affair with a novice filmmaker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child.

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

Edwards said he told his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family about the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

"The story is false, it's completely untrue, it's ridiculous," Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

The former Senator said his wife had not known about the meeting.

Since becoming pregnant, Hunter has lived under assumed names in a series of expensive homes in North Carolina and, more recently, in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Edwards denied paying any money to Hunter to keep her from going public but said it was possible some of his friends or supporters may have made payments without telling him.

He said he would ask questions about any possible arrangement.

Watch the full interview tonight on "Nightline" at 11:35 p.m. ET

 

The Enquirer was RIGHT?