Edwards Admits Fathering Love Child

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/21/report-john-edwards-set-admit-paternity-love-child/

January 21, 2010
Edwards Admits Fathering Love Child, Reportedly Separates From Wife
FOXNews.com

Former presidential candidate John Edwards has admitted fathering his former campaign videographer's child.

In a statement released to NBC News, Edwards said, "I am Quinn’s father. ... It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me."

Friends of the family said that Edwards and wife, Elizabeth, have separated, NBC reported.

The admission comes after months of denials from Edwards that he fathered former mistress Rielle Hunter's daughter, Frances Quinn. The revelation also comes a week before his former campaign aide, Andrew Young, is set to appear in an ABC News interview saying he posed as the father when the scandal first broke as a favor to Edwards.

The two-time presidential candidate also admitted to providing financial support to the child and said in the statement that he has "reached an agreement with her mother to continue providing support in the future."

"To all those I have disappointed and hurt these words will never be enough, but I am truly sorry," Edwards said.

Edwards' wife told The Associated Press that "the whole family feels relieved" that her husband claimed paternity, but she would not comment on the status of their marriage.

Young's interview is scheduled to air on ABC next Friday, but may be pushed forward.

Previous reports have claimed that a secret DNA test proved Edwards' paternity to the child.

The test was taken after Hunter tried to get financial help from Edwards for Frances.

Edwards admitted in August 2008 to an affair with Hunter that he says ended in 2006. That year, Edwards' political action committee paid Hunter's video production firm $100,000 for work. Then the committee paid another $14,086 on April 1, 2007.

A federal grand jury last year investigated whether Edwards broke campaign finance law by paying "hush" money to Hunter and Young over the affair.

Ex-aide says Edwards fathered mistress' child

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/ex-aide-says-edwards-fathered-mistress-child/

Ex-aide says Edwards fathered mistress' child
NY Times: Edwards aide who claimed paternity of mistress' child says Edwards fathered child
AP News
Sep 19, 2009

A man who once claimed to have fathered the child of John Edwards' mistress says in a book proposal the former presidential candidate is the real father and that Edwards and worked with his campaign finance chairman to hide that secret, according to a newspaper report published online Saturday.

The New York Times said the book proposal by former Edwards aide Andrew Young states he helped facilitate the affair between Edwards and Rielle Hunter. According to the newspaper, Young wrote that Edwards once told Hunter they would wed after Edwards' wife, who has cancer, died.

Edwards told Hunter that the ceremony would be held on a rooftop in New York and the Dave Matthews Bands would make an appearance, the newspaper said, citing its examination of the book proposal.

St. Martin's Press has said Young signed a book deal with the publisher in June and it involved a strict confidentiality agreement. A spokesman for the publisher did not immediately return a phone message and e-mail seeking comment Saturday.

Edwards has said the affair with Hunter ended in 2006. That year, Edwards' political action committee paid Hunter's video production firm $100,000 for work. Then the committee paid another $14,086 on April 1, 2007. The Edwards camp has said the latter payment from the PAC was exchanged for 100 hours of unused videotape Hunter shot.

The same day, the Edwards presidential campaign had injected $14,034.61 into the PAC for a "furniture purchase," according to federal election records.

Edwards, a U.S. senator representing North Carolina from 1998 until his vice presidential bid in 2004, acknowledged in May that federal investigators are looking into how he used campaign funds. Grand jury proceedings are secret, and the U.S. attorney's office in Raleigh has declined to confirm or deny an investigation.

Edwards adamantly denied during an interview with ABC News last summer that he had fathered a child with Hunter, and he welcomed a paternity test. His wife, Elizabeth, has said she doesn't know if her husband is the father.

Young said in 2007 he was the child's father. Hunter said around the same time that Young was the father and the birth certificate does not list a father's name.

Michael Critchley, Hunter's attorney, declined to comment Saturday. A lawyer for Young did not immediately return messages left at his office Saturday.

Joyce Fitzpatrick, a spokeswoman for Edwards and his attorney, Wade Smith, said that Edwards would not comment Saturday. Smith has said Edwards may make a statement at some point in the future about the paternity of Frances Quinn Hunter, who is 19-months old, but there was no timetable for that.

Young hasn't spoken publicly since saying he was the father in 2007 and has repeatedly ignored reporter requests for interviews.

Young got his last campaign paycheck in the middle of November, a month before he and Hunter publicly declared through attorneys that he was the father. Fred Baron, who was Edwards' national finance chairman and a wealthy Dallas-based trial attorney, said last year he quietly sent money to Hunter and to Young's family to resettle in California.

Baron, who died following complications from cancer just a few months after Edwards acknowledged the affair, said he provided the money on his own, to "help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to move forward on their own."

The New York Times said the book proposal states Edwards knew from the start that he was the father of the child and expended considerable effort trying to conceal that. The proposal says Edwards pleaded with Young to claim paternity and asked Baron to check whether a doctor would fake the results of a paternity test.

JOHN EDWARDS SECRET DNA TEST

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/john_edwards_secret_dna_test_proves_paternity_mistress_testifies_federalgrand_jury_/celebrity/67120

JOHN EDWARDS SECRET DNA TEST PROVES HE'S THE DADDY!
08/12/2009

BOMBSHELL WORLD EXCLUSIVE! John Edwards has secretly undergone a DNA test - and it proves he's the father of his mistress' love child, The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively.

Multiple sources confirm the bombshell development, and reveal lawyers for the disgraced presidential candidate are privately hammering out child support payments with his former lover Rielle Hunter.

Edwards - who hotly denied he was the child's father when he publicly confessed his affair with Rielle on ABC's Nightline a year ago - has broken the news to his cancer-stricken wife Elizabeth, sources say.

But The ENQUIRER has also learned that Rielle testified against Edwards before a federal grand jury that's probing whether he broke campaign finance laws by secretly funneling money to her - and her testimony could send the former North Carolina senator to jail!

The positive DNA test finally ends the elaborate cover-up that Edwards engineered to hide the fact that he fathered Rielle's 18-month-old daughter Frances.

As The ENQUIRER previously reported in a series of explosive investigative reports, the cover-up involved "hush money" paid to Rielle and Andrew Young, a once-loyal Edwards aide who claimed he'd fathered her child. The secret payments were made by the late Fred Baron, who was Edwards' national finance chairman.

With Young being left out to dry by Edwards, he pulled a "John Dean" to testify before the grand jury before he could publish his tell-all book about the conspiracy.

"Rielle had no choice but to demand John take a DNA test," said the close friend.

"She was worried about getting long-term financial support for her daughter. So she hired an attorney, and John consented to undergo a secret swab test to establish paternity.

"There was no surprise: The results of the DNA test proved John was Frances' daddy."

Another source confirmed to The ENQUIRER: "John always knew he was the father of Rielle's baby.

"Despite the ongoing financial negotiations, sources say Rielle testified against Edwards in front of the grand jury, spending nine hours inside the courthouse on Aug. 6 in Raleigh, N.C.

Rielle's testimony against Edwards came as a "cooperating witness" for the government, added a source familiar with the investigation.

"Rielle is not dumb. She knew the feds had subpoenaed her bank statements and knew about every payment she received," said the source.

"The FBI told her it was in her best interests to tell the truth, and she did. And unlike the others who have testified, Rielle was driven to the court by FBI agents and escorted in by them. She got favorable treatment because she testified against John."

FOR THE FULL STORY with all the details you won't find anywhere else get the latest ENQUIRER on sale now!

Edwards hit by new love-child allegations

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/edwards-hit-by-new-lovechild-allegations-1726204.html

Edwards hit by new love-child allegations
By David Usborne
Wednesday, 1 July 2009

A former aide to John Edwards, the one-time senator whose presidential campaign last year came spectacularly to grief on the rocks of an illicit affair, is set to claim in a tell-all book that his erstwhile boss assured him he would be "taken care of for life" if he pretended to be the father of a child the woman bore.

The remarkable assertion is one of the highlights of a proposal for his book reportedly presented to the St Martin's Press publishing house. In it, the aide, Andrew Young, also claims that Mr Edwards made a sex videotape with his former mistress, Rielle Hunter, which he subsequently discovered.

Asking Mr Young to pose as the father, Mr Edwards purportedly told him, "You know how much I love you. You know I'd walk off a cliff for you, and I know you'd walk off a cliff for me." The candidate, who was once the Democratic Party's golden boy and was John Kerry's running mate in 2004, went on: "I will never forget this. And I will always be there for you."

The book will apparently assert that the father of the child is indeed Mr Edwards. The one-time rival of Mr Obama in the 2008 primaries has so far not submitted to a DNA test to determine the truth of this. However, he is still at the heart of a federal investigation into whether campaign money was used in connection with the affair or to help with the efforts to cover it up. Mr Young says that the FBI has already interviewed him in this regard.

The startling new details contained in the proposal – and the prospect of the book coming out – make the chances of a political rehabilitation for Mr Edwards seem more remote than ever. "In a culture in which it is almost impossible to sin yourself into permanent banishment... Edwards may have pulled the feat off," Jay Bookman, a commentator for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted yesterday. "It is impossible to feel sympathy for the man."

Not that Mr Young himself is likely to solicit very much sympathy. As part of his alleged deal with Mr Edwards, he invited the pregnant Ms Hunter to move in with him, his wife and their three children. This most peculiar co-habitation ended only after Ms Hunter gave birth.

The saga is thus also about the suffering of the wives involved. In her own recent book, Resilience, Elizabeth Edwards admits that there is one "pathetic" former aide to her husband she cannot bring herself even to name. "I will call him Jim," she writes, calling him an "obsessed fan", who showed an "unbridled loyalty" to her husband and a "willingness to do anything". Few have any doubts that she is referring to the aide who has now turned author, Mr Young.

Get Rielle

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/08/16/rielle_hunter/

Get Rielle
The life of John Edwards flame Rielle Hunter has been a novel, literally, with Bolivian marching powder, movie scripts called "It's All About Uranus" and electrocuted horses.
By Justin Jouvenal

Aug. 16, 2008 Before John Edwards' mistress was a journalistic curiosity, she was a literary inspiration. Rielle Hunter was the model for the drug-addled Alison Poole, a vapid and endearing Manhattan party girl who appeared in at least three novels by two of the bright lights on the '80s literary scene, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

We can only guess what attracted Edwards to Hunter. He told Bob Woodruff in the now famous ABC interview that he shared the details of the affair with his wife, Elizabeth, and that was all he was saying. By the time Edwards met Hunter in 2006, she had put down the coke spoon and picked up "The Power of Now," a self-help book by Eckhart Tolle. She had remade herself into a New Age guru and was on a mission to help "people wake up in their lives." Whatever the reason for it, the attraction between the well-coiffed Southern politician and the once wild New York party girl has granted added intrigue to this year's political sex scandal.

McInerney, made famous by "Bright Lights, Big City," his highly entertaining descent into the dark side of yuppiedom, briefly dated Hunter in the '80s. He has said he was so "intrigued and appalled" by the hedonistic Hunter and her friends that they became the raw material for his 1988 novel, "Story of My Life." At the time, Hunter was an aspiring Manhattan actress, who ran with a crowd as devoted to cocaine as art. She made the rounds with Ellis and partied with artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"I still remember the first time I saw her," Pigeon O'Brien, a friend of Hunter's in New York, told Salon. "I was going to a party. As I approached, the doors of this 1920s building burst open. [Hunter] and Jay were laughing hysterically and collapsed on the sidewalk together. They looked like Scott and Zelda to me." In fact, like one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous characters, Hunter was hiding her own dark family secret.

Hunter, whose given name was Lisa Druck, was born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1964. Her father, James Druck, was a wealthy attorney, who ABC News reported flew his own plane and owned a horse farm called Eagle Crest in Ocala, Fla. In her youth, according to ESPN, Hunter loved riding and competed in shows across the state on her favorite horse, Henry the Hawk.

But after James Druck got into financial trouble, he allegedly hired a man named Tommy "The Sandman" Burns in 1982 to electrocute Henry the Hawk, so Druck could collect a $150,000 life insurance policy he had taken out on the horse.

In a 1992 story in Sports Illustrated, Burns claimed Druck showed him the technique: slice an extension cord into strands, attach alligator clips to the exposed end of each strand, stick the alligator clips on the horse's ear and rectum and then plug the extension cord into a wall socket. Burns went on to execute a number of horses this way as part of insurance scams for other wealthy equestrians.

"You better get out of the way," Burns told Sports Illustrated. "They go down immediately. One horse dropped so fast in the stall, he must have broken his neck when he hit the floor. It's a sick thing, I know, but it was quick and it was painless."

Burns was among a group of 35 people, who were arrested and convicted in the '90s of crimes related to the killings. After Henry the Hawk's death, Hunter reportedly completed high school in Florida and then studied for less than two years at the University of Tampa, before dropping out.

At some point in the '80s, Hunter made her way to New York to pursue acting and fell in with McInerney's social circle. O'Brien described Hunter, who was still going by the name Lisa Druck, as "intense" and a "firecracker." "She was kind of a little unsophisticated," O'Brien said. "She was like a horse just getting its legs. She had this great intellect but hadn't yet harnessed or focused it." In a 2005 discussion between Hunter and McInerney in the now defunct Breathe Magazine, McInerney recalled meeting Hunter at Nell's, a famous New York club. She disputes that they met there, but confesses that "so much of ["Story of My Life"] was real."

"For me you're a little bit frozen in time, a little bit Alison Poole, the 21-year-old party girl in that book who runs around New York going to night clubs, doing drugs, and abusing credit cards," McInerney told Hunter. "And I'm sure that your life wasn't that simple or that extreme or that wasteable." Via a publicist, McInerney declined to be interviewed.

In "Story of My Life," Poole is exactly how McInerney describes her. She is a jaded aspiring actress, who lives off an allowance from her rich father, while flitting between clubs, coke and acting classes. "Men. I've never met any," she laments. "They're all boys. I wish I didn't want them so much. I've had a few dreams about making it with girls, but it's kind of like -- sure I'd love to visit Norway sometime."

In one scene, Poole scams $1,000 from a Wall Street type with whom she had an affair -- who gave her a sexually transmitted disease -- by claiming she is pregnant by him and needs money for an abortion. Later, Poole falls in love with a commodities trader with a thing for Shakespeare, but ultimately they betray each other. Poole is not totally unredeemed. She has a blunt, unflinching honesty that McInerney told Hunter in the Breathe interview he drew directly from her.

The novel also echoes Hunter's past and, in some eerie ways, the Edwards affair. In the final chapter, Poole reveals that her father may have killed her prize horse, Dangerous Dan, by poisoning him. And like the current scandal, Poole finds out she is pregnant, but there are two separate men that could be the father. The type of man Poole is attracted to seems strikingly like Edwards. "I like straight guys, I'd never go out with anybody who's as irresponsible as me," she says. "Most of the guys I know have really high powered jobs and make up for lost time when they're not in the office. The Berserk After Work Club. I seem to attract them in a big way, all these boys in Paul Stuart suits with six-figure salaries and hellfire on a dimmer switch in their eyes."

Alison Poole makes return appearances in Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" and "Glamorama" reprising the same Manhattan siren who captivates men and repels women. In one scene in "American Psycho," a woman snipes about Alison, "If you had an American Express card she'd give you a blow job."

Ready for something new, Hunter left New York for Los Angeles to escape the drugs and pursue her acting career. In 1991, she married attorney Alexander M. Hunter III, whose father was the prosecutor in the JonBenet Ramsey case, and the couple lived in Beverly Hills.

Ensconced in the movie industry, Hunter assumed a new role for herself. She legally dropped Lisa Druck for Rielle Hunter and penned scripts for TV and movies with oddball titles such as "Jupiter Where Are You?" "Shit Happens: The Never Ending Search for the Perfect Diaper," and the seemingly porn ready "It's All About Uranus." None of these treatments appears to have made it into production. Nor did a later idea to create a television series about women who have affairs with men to help them get out of loveless marriages. Hunter's marriage was equally a flop. She divorced Alexander in 1999.

In 2000, Hunter shot her only film credit, a short comedy called "Billy Bob and Them," which she wrote, produced, acted in and directed. The film's cinematographer, George Mooradian, told Fox News that the movie, which was shot in Hunter's home, had little plot and featured New Age-style altars, temples and crystals. Mooradian's agent said he was not giving further interviews.

"She definitely had some connection to the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, and there was an offer to meet the Dalai Lama," Mooradian has said. With her move to California, Hunter had discovered a new high in New Age spirituality. In Breathe Magazine, she described a dramatic encounter with a healer, who cleared her "energy field," snuffing out her desire for drugs and alcohol. "I became sober overnight," she told McInerney. "And then I became a spiritual seeker -- addicted to higher consciousness, addicted to enlightenment."

Hunter pursued spirituality with the same abandon that she had once pursued drugs. On her Web site, Hunter wrote she spent "thousands and thousands" of dollars on gurus. At one point, she hocked a rare statue of one of her favorites -- Baba Muktananda -- to raise money for a retreat. Hunter said at the 2004 retreat she had a spiritual breakthrough, or, as she later put it: "Shift happens."

In 2005, Hunter and her friend O'Brien crossed paths again. "The first thing she said to me was, 'I am awake,'" O'Brien told Salon. "She said she had achieved some higher level of consciousness."

Hunter set up a nonprofit foundation called Being Is Free to spread her spiritual ideas. The foundation's Web site has been scrubbed from the Internet, although parts of it have been preserved at Deceiver.com. Salon contacted the foundation's directors by e-mail and phone, but they did not respond to inquiries. On the site, Hunter effuses about her spiritual journey, Prada backpacks and her relationships, exhibiting the sense of humor of the old party girl: "I've come to realize through a lot of experience that men are in fact good for a couple of things. Three things to be specific. Penetration, moving heavy objects and causing enlightenment."

Just as she met McInerney, Hunter, in 2006, met Edwards in a New York bar. While he may have been smitten with her in the obvious ways, she was on a messianic mission. Jonathan Darman, a Newsweek reporter, who befriended Hunter while he was covering Edwards, wrote that Edwards was Hunter's latest enlightenment project. "Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential." He had the power to "change the world." If Edwards could only tap into his heart more, Hunter believed he could be a leader on par with Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.

Hunter set up a video production company and received $100,000 from Edwards' campaign to film a series of short Web films about him. The candid movies were supposed to present John Edwards uncut -- a loose, spontaneous version of the candidate. In the first "Webisode," Edwards jokes and lounges on a plane as he prepares a speech. "I've come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am," Edwards said. "But I don't know what the result of that will be."

Hunter, who once sought the media spotlight like a moth does a flame, has fluttered into the shadows since the scandal broke. Her phone number is unlisted and e-mail sent to her personal address bounces back.