US News

Rielle Hunter calls Elizabeth Edwards ‘witch on wheels’ in new memoir

Rielle Hunter, in a gossipy new memoir, calls the cancer-stricken wife of her lover, former presidential candidate John Edwards, a “witch on wheels” and claims that while they were furtively seeing each other he lied about having three other mistresses at the same time, according to a new report.

Hunter, who has a four-year-old daughter with Edwards, says she wrote the book, “What Really Happened,” to give young Frances Quinn “one entirely truthful public account of how she came into the world. After all, this is her story too.”

ABC News reported Monday that it had obtained a copy of the book, which will be released June 26. Hunter also will appear in an interview on ABC’s “20/20” Friday.

There was no immediate response from Edwards, who was acquitted last month on one count of violating campaign finance rules in order to funnel money to Hunter. A mistrial was declared on five other counts and the US Justice Department later said it would not re-try the former Democratic senator.

As Hunter describes her then-secret relationship with Edwards, she apparently spares no sympathy for his wife, Elizabeth, who died of breast cancer in 2010.

According to ABC, Hunter describes Elizabeth Edwards, her lover’s wife of three decades, as a “witch on wheels” and also calls her “crazy”, “venomous” and given to fits of “rage.”

She also complains that after Elizabeth Edwards discovered Hunter’s existence, she repeatedly phoned her “for the next two days at all hours of the day and night from various numbers” in an attempt to intimidate her.

The Hunter-Edwards saga began on Feb. 21, 2006, ABC says, when they met in the bar at the New York Regency Hotel and she told him “you are so hot.” Shortly after that, he invited her up to his room.

That first night, Edwards told Hunter he had three other simultaneous mistresses in Chicago, Los Angeles and Florida. In the weeks that followed, he even described trips to break up with them.

Later, she wrote, he told her they were fictitious, made up so she — and other former mistresses — would not become too attached.

But after initially feeling “my reality in our relationship had been ripped out from under me,” she then decided, “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.”

She said Edwards ultimately acknowledged having additional affairs before 2004 but led her to believe she was the last one, ABC said.

The network said Hunter was vague about her current relationship with Edwards.

“I really have no idea what will happen with us. The jury is still out,” she writes. “But 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.”