Candidate, Philanderer and Juggler, Too: Edwards Trial Shows Deception’s Strains By KIM SEVERSON Published: May 20, 2012
GREENSBORO, N.C. — John Edwards ran for president in 2008 vowing to bridge the two Americas, the rich one and the poor one. There were two John Edwardses as well: a candidate and a lover so enthralled with his mistress that he could not stop the affair even when his top aides told him it would ruin his political career.
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Damon Winter/The New York Times John Edwards campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in January 2008 at St. Helena Island, S.C. He dropped out of the race late that month.
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Related Edwards Jury Retires for the Weekend(May 19, 2012) Edwards Defense Asks the Jury to Distinguish Sin From Crime(May 18, 2012) Edwards Charged With Election Finance Fraud(June 4, 2011)
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Shawn Rocco/The News & Observer, via Associated Press Mr. Edwards outside the federal courthouse in Greensboro, N.C., as the jury deliberated last week.
Whether the two Americas will ever become one remains to be seen. But the two lives of John Edwards have collided spectacularly in a federal courthouse here, where the government is trying him on six counts of campaign finance fraud and conspiracy.
Prosecutors say he got cash, private jets and other help with a value totaling more than $1 million from two wealthy political supporters to hide his mistress and their child from the public and his wife, Elizabeth.
Mr. Edwards says it was nothing more than gifts from friends. A jury returns on Monday to resume deliberations in the case.
Meanwhile, those who spent nearly a month on the hard wooden benches in Judge Catherine C. Eagles’s Art Deco courtroom have had room to reflect on a mountain of detail that illuminates what it was like to run for president while orchestrating a tryst that became a national scandal.
Over weeks of testimony, it became clear that, at least for a time, Mr. Edwards was perhaps the world’s greatest multitasker.
He had to manage an increasingly suspicious and distraught wife who was determined to get him to White House, as well as be a father to three (and eventually four) children and conduct an affair with an unemployed woman who had expensive needs, a spiritual adviser and a taste for Hollywood — all while running for president.
He even managed to make a videotape said to show him having sex with his mistress, which was ordered destroyed in an earlier civil suit.
Andrew Young, the aide who once claimed paternity of the child, had taken the tape as a kind of insurance. Like many people on Mr. Edwards’s campaign staff — some of whom testified against him — Mr. Young turned from true believer into one of the betrayed.
Mr. Edwards was in a crowded bar in the Regency hotel in New York in February 2006 when Ms. Hunter first approached him. He was having drinks with a donor, building a base for what he then thought would probably be a two-person race between him and Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
By that summer, Ms. Hunter had been hired to make a series of “webisodes” to show his personal side. Despite hundreds of hours of video and more than $100,000, the end result appeared amateurish. Only one appeared briefly during the campaign.
Jurors saw their shaky camera work and speakers who were out of focus or barely in the frame.
“I thought the webisodes were a disaster,” Nick Baldick told the court. Like some senior advisers and lesser aides, Mr. Baldick, who ran Mr. Edwards’s 2004 presidential campaign, eventually left during the 2008 bid in part, he told the jury, because of the affair.
Staff members became increasingly baffled by how much pull Ms. Hunter seemed to have with the candidate.
At first, it was the little things. She called him “Johnny” when every other staff member called him “Senator.” She traveled on his private jet, not the commercial flights most campaign workers took. The senator, so used to being cared for that aides knew to have three newspapers and his preferred brand of soda ready in the car, was carrying her luggage off the plane.
As the campaign heated up, so did suspicions and her demands.
“JRE just told me to make sure we get Rielle health insurance,” an Edwards aide, Josh Brumberger, said in an e-mail to Mr. Baldick.
“Why?” Mr. Baldick wrote back. “She’s not an employee. We don’t provide health insurance to other consultants.”
“That’s what I said,” responded Mr. Brumberger, who would later be fired for confronting Mr. Edwards about the affair. “He said, ‘Figure it out.’ ”
Earlier, a concerned Mr. Brumberger had Peter Scher, a banking executive and political adviser, try to control the situation.
In the fall of 2006, they met at the same hotel where Mr. Edwards had first met Ms. Hunter. |
