TROUBLED: Elizabeth Edwards, with John in ’07, was a “witch on wheels” who attacked him as he confessed his affair, his mistress says.
Exclusive new photos show John Edwards and his loony lover, Rielle Hunter, spending a long weekend at his beach house, hugging, flirting and playing in the sand with their love child.
Hunter laments in her new tell-all, “What Really Happened: John Edwards, our Daughter and Me,” that her relationship with the former presidential candidate is confusing and complicated.
“I really have no idea what will happen with us. The jury is still out. I can honestly say that the ending is of no concern to me anymore. The love is here. And as sappy as it may sound, I love living in love,” she writes.
But in these photographs — taken this weekend at Edwards’ vacation home on Figure Eight Island, NC — it’s clear the two are still quite an item.
Edwards was spotted giggling in a parking lot with Hunter — whom he once derided as a “crazy slut” — then planting a kiss on her cheek.
Earlier, the duo frolicked in the sand and surf with their love child, Quinn, whom Edwards had denied fathering on national TV.
Hunter is very defensive of her “Johnny” in her book — but she bares her claws for his long-suffering wife, Elizabeth, who died of breast cancer in 2010 after their affair came to light.
Elizabeth was “crazy,” a “venomous” “witch on wheels” who had constant “rage,” Hunter writes.
She said Elizabeth “was bonkers because she had been in denial” about the affair, and she “physically attack[ed] him during all the screaming” when Edwards confessed.
Hunter writes that she doesn’t consider the doomed wife an “innocent victim.”
The marriage, she says, was “filled with issues that clearly neither Johnny nor Elizabeth wanted to address. They did not want to disclose the truth to themselves, much less the public.”
Elizabeth became increasingly suspicious of his relationship with Hunter, who was working on his campaign as a videographer.
In December 2006, Elizabeth found her husband had a second cellphone he used exclusively to call his mistress. Elizabeth got hold of the phone and dialed Hunter’s number to confront her.
Hunter answered, “Hey, baby,” she writes. Elizabeth hung up.
But an enraged Elizabeth called Hunter incessantly “for the next two days at all hours of the day and night from various numbers” in an attempt to scare her off, according to the book.
For all her hatred for Elizabeth, Hunter makes nothing but apologies for Edwards, who beat six federal charges of campaign-finance violations two weeks ago.
“He was temporarily insane” and “needed serious help” when he denied paternity of their child in August 2008, she writes.
“Think about it: Sane healthy people do not deny their children, especially on national TV, simply because they are afraid of their abusive spouse’s reaction. Only a mentally off person would do that,” she says.
Edwards told Hunter he had mistresses in Los Angeles, Chicago and Florida, but she says she was so wildly in love with him, she stuck with him anyway.
Those women turned out to be a lie. Edwards invented them so he wouldn’t get too serious too fast with Hunter, she says.
”Johnny didn’t do anything out of character. He has a long history of lying about one thing only — women — and I mistakenly thought I was different,” Hunter writes.
“Johnny went on to tell me that the three women he had told me about the first night I had met him were, in fact, not real and that he had made them up . . . My mind was racing.
She says he even made up stories about having taxing break-ups with the ladies.
“He had told me detail upon detail. I remembered the ups and downs of emotion I had felt the night he went to Chicago to break off his relationship there,” she says.
“My reality in our relationship had been ripped out from under me.”
She justifies his reasons for lying to her, believing he didn’t want her to get too attached.
“I really don’t believe his lying about women was malicious. He used it as a defense to keep real feelings at bay,” she writes.
Hunter gushed over the details of their first meeting, in 2006, at the New York Regency Hotel.
“We were like a pair of teenagers,” she writes. “Completely attached.
“I had never in my life experienced anything like that meeting. It actually made me dizzy.
“There was a very strong connection between us, I was certain of it.
“I was now directly facing the alleged John Edwards. He looked directly at me, not smiling. I returned his gaze, also not smiling. He rested his face in his hands and continued to glance at me during the rest of his meeting. This was weird. I knew this man,” Hunter writes.
Afterward, she ran into him outside the hotel.
“As he rounded the corner, he saw me and just lit up. I was very surprised to see him so soon, even though I had felt certain our paths would cross again. I could feel his joy when he saw me and I responded to it. Much to my own astonishment, ‘You are so hot!’ came flying out of my mouth. Not a usual greeting for me . . . His smile got even brighter,” she writes.
Hunter’s biggest regret from the affair, she writes, was agreeing to allow Edwards’ aide Andrew Young to claim paternity of their child when the media learned she was pregnant.
“Of all the things that happened in my relationship with Johnny the thing that I regret the most is going along with this stupid idea and allowing this lie to go public,” she writes.
Edwards publicly acknowledged the 4-year-old only after the judge declared a mistrial on May 31.
“My precious Quinn, whom I love more than any of you could ever imagine, and I am so close to and am so, so grateful for,” he said on the courthouse steps.
Hunter says she wrote the book for Quinn, so she could “have one entirely truthful public account of how she came into the world. After all, this is her story too.”
Hunter also fumes at the allegations that resulted in her lover standing trial.
Wealthy donors Bunny Mellon and Fred Baron had made huge campaign contributions that Edwards allegedly used to keep the sordid affair with Hunter secret.
“Countless press reports year after year said Bunny’s money paid for my expenses, yet not one report stated that Andrew double dipped and Fred actually paid for everything,” she writes,.
“I have stood in the kitchen of my little rental house and screamed in frustration more than once: ‘Where is my million dollars? You are going to send Johnny to jail for money that I never even got? That he supposedly solicited for me?’ ” she says.
She was given $5,000 monthly allowance from Young, and a white BMW, and lived in the Youngs’ home in North Carolina and in Santa Barbara.
Hunter also reveals how she became “new age” after experimenting with cocaine.
“I don’t like to think of myself as a stupid person, but I have done a lot of things in my life that were just plain stupid,” she writes. “Snorting cocaine is stupid.”