Aide Tells of the Demise of His Friendship With Edwards
Chris Keane/Reuters
Andrew Young, right, the government’s star witness as a former aide to John Edwards, with Charles Stuber of the F.B.I. in Greensboro, N.C., on Tuesday.
By KIM SEVERSON Published: April 25, 2012
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GREENSBORO, N.C. — Federal prosecutors here spent Wednesday morning laying out the crumbling relationship between former Senator John Edwards and Andrew Young, the key witness in the government’s case against Mr. Edwards, painting a vivid portrait of the frantic final months of a cover-up that ended Mr. Edwards’s political career.
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Chris Keane/Reuters Former Senator John Edwards and his elder daughter, Cate, arrived at court Tuesday.
Mr. Young, a former top Edwards aide, testified that as it became clear that Mr. Edwards’s secret paternity of a child with Rielle Hunter, a onetime campaign videographer, was about to be exposed and that the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination was out of reach, that Mr. Edwards had sought to hold on to his slim hopes of a vice presidential selection by seeking to distance himself from Mr. Young.
During a secret meeting in the summer of 2008, the two men nearly came to blows, Mr. Young told the court. “We had a very angry exchange,” he said.
But Mr. Young said that Mr. Edwards had defused the situation by saying “that he loved me and that I knew he would never abandon me.”
At the time, Mr. Young was engaged in an elaborate public performance of pretending to be the father of Mr. Edwards’s and Ms. Hunter’s child. The child and Ms. Hunter, along with Mr. Young and his wife and children, lived in a house in Santa Barbara, Calif., that was being paid for by Fred Baron, a lawyer and multimillionaire Edwards supporter, who has since died.
Mr. Young testified that after the National Enquirer had published photographs of Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter with their secret child at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills that Mr. Edwards had promised to appear on national television and admit the affair.
But when Mr. Edwards did not come clean, Mr. Young said he became increasingly angry and concerned that he would be left legally liable for a cover-up that involved taking nearly $1 million from Mr. Baron and from Rachel Mellon, a banking heiress.
Whether that money amounted to a personal loan to conceal the affair from Mr. Edwards’s wife or illicit campaign contributions remains at the crux of Mr. Edwards’s conspiracy trial, in which he faces up to 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.
The last time the two men talked, Mr. Young said Wednesday, was in August 2008, when they met on a rural road not far from Mr. Edwards’s home in Chapel Hill, N.C.
There, Mr. Young said that Mr. Edwards had broken a final piece of bad news: that a long promised job at a foundation financed by Ms. Mellon was no longer in the cards.
Mr. Edwards went on to complain that “his life was hell,” because his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, had taken to waking him up at night to scream at him about the affair, Mr. Young testified.
“It was surreal,” he said.
Mr. Young said he finally told Mr. Edwards that if he did not publicly acknowledge the child’s paternity soon that Mr. Young would release details about the affair himself.
Mr. Edwards, he said, had seemed unfazed.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You can’t hurt me Andrew. You can’t hurt me,’ ” said Mr. Young.
Earlier in his testimony, Mr. Young said that he and Mr. Edwards had worked together to hide the affair beginning in the fall of 2006, after Mrs. Edwards found out about it and demanded that Ms. Hunter be fired from Mr. Edwards’s campaign. Mrs. Edwards died in 2010 of breast cancer.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Edwards’s lawyers will cross-examine Mr. Young, likely seeking to discredit him by delving into how he spent some of the money from Mr. Baron and Ms. Mellon, as well as inaccuracies in a book, “The Politician,” that Mr. Young wrote about the affair. |
