Mr. Young worked for Mr. Edwards in Washington and Raleigh, eventually moving into fund-raising. His big break came in 2005 when he picked up the phone and the wealthy banking heiress Rachel Mellon was on the other end. Nicknamed Bunny, she had gotten his number from a friend and wanted to help elect Mr. Edwards president. Mr. Young brokered a meeting at her Virginia estate, and she gave $1 million, he testified. Eventually, other money from Ms. Mellon — Bunny money, he said Mr. Edwards called it — would finance the expensive lifestyle preferred by Rielle Hunter, the campaign videographer who became Mr. Edwards’s mistress.
By 2006, Elizabeth Edwards, Mr. Edwards’s wife, had discovered the affair. So Mr. Young became the lovers’ go-between, holding the special “bat phone” that Mr. Edwards used to call Ms. Hunter and making sure she got in and out of hotel rooms so the two could be together.
Mr. Young said he went to increasingly elaborate lengths to help Mr. Edwards hide his relationship with Ms. Hunter. At one political event where both women were present, it was his job to keep them apart. In return, Mr. Edwards gave Mr. Young access to his business associates and helped him acquire some land so Mr. Young and his wife could build a dream house. Such was his devotion to Mr. Edwards that by the end of their relationship in 2008, Mr. Young would claim paternity of the child Mr. Edwards fathered with Ms. Hunter while running for president. “You said you actually fell in love with Mr. Edwards?” Abbe D. Lowell, Mr. Edwards’s lawyer, asked him at one point during last week’s testimony.
“We all did,” Mr. Young replied.
And, Mr. Lowell pressed, you fell out of love?
“Later, yes sir.”
Mr. Edwards had stopped taking his calls. Mr. Young feared that the ride was over and that he would be left criminally liable, he testified.
The defense lawyer showed the jury an e-mail, written by Mr. Young in 2009, in which he said he wanted to defecate on the head of Mr. Edwards, the man who had once meant everything to him. |
