She called him “Love Lips” – and visited her “somewhat dysfunctional married man” in North Carolina.
A new report reveals that former party girl and John Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter wrote e-mails chronicling her affair with presidential wannabe John Edwards.
Early in April 2006, Hunter e-mailed a pal about a trip down South to visit Edwards and discussed the downside of “being in love with a (still somewhat dysfunctional) married man,” according to The Huffington Post.
The revelation came as Hunter, 42, broke her silence for the first time yesterday to let Edwards off the hook.
She will not pester her ex-lover to take a DNA test to establish once and for all the paternity of her 5-month-old daughter, her lawyer said.
Hunter, 42, does not wish to take a genetic test “now or in the future,” attorney Robert Gordon said in a statement.
During an interview Friday in which he copped to the fling, Edwards said the “timing of events” indicate that the child, born on Feb. 27, 2008, could not be his.
“Happy to take a paternity test and would love to see it happen,” he said.
But Hunter’s stance is that she would prefer to “maintain her privacy and her daughter’s privacy,” Gordon said.
The mother did not list the father’s name on little Frances Quinn Hunter’s birth certificate.
Barry Levine, editor of The National Enquirer, which broke the news of the affair, told The Post yesterday: “Up to this hour, I can tell you from our sources, she’s believing that eventually she and John Edwards will be together and this will all work out.”
Dismissing the paternity issue lets some of the immediate pressure off Edwards – but likely not for long.
A number of other questions about the details of the affair arose yesterday regarding facts that don’t jibe with his statements Friday about the length of the adulterous relationship and about how and when he came clean to his wife and family:
* Edwards told Bob Woodruff that the relationship “took place for a short period in 2006” and that “it ended then.”
But sources told The Post that the couple met in late 2005 or early 2006 at the bar in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. The Huffington Post reported that the relationship lasted about a year.
Hunter traveled with the candidate, starting in July 2006, for more than four months – and continued to receive payments for her work for him until April 2007.
When asked by Woodruff if he had hired Hunter before the affair began, Edwards responded, “That is correct.”
But records show that she was first paid by his political action committee for four short documentaries she made of the presumptive candidate in July 2006.
The new e-mails would indicate that the affair was well under way by April – three months earlier.
Hunter – who had no prior video or production experience – incorporated her company, Midline Groove Productions, just five days before the committee cut her first check.
She would eventually make about $114,000 for her “Webisodes.”
* Edwards said he told his wife, Elizabeth, about the affair.
“This was in 2006,” he told Woodruff. “She was mad. She was angry. I think ‘furious’ would be a good way to describe it.”
But on Dec. 29, 2006, he was photographed sitting on a campaign plane alongside his mistress.
Just one day earlier, he’d stood at a press conference in New Orleans and declared his intention to make a second run for the presidency.
* Edwards also claimed that he personally broke the news of his illicit activities to his wife of 31 years – and that she did not hear about it publicly.
“I, in 2006, told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for his forgiveness,” he said during the interview.
But, according to The Huffington Post, the flirty rapport between Edwards and Hunter in the Webisodes shot by Hunter had raised eyebrows among many in the candidate’s inner circle.
Edwards even says in one that he had gone shoe shopping with her.
At one point, Elizabeth Edwards called up a staffer working on the films to ask for Hunter’s phone number, The Huffington Post reported.
Hunter seems to have disappeared from Edwards’ traveling staff after he ramped up his presidential-campaign efforts in earnest in 2007.
But she appears to have been living right under Elizabeth’s nose once she became pregnant. According to The National Enquirer, Hunter spent her pregnancy living near Andrew Young, Edwards’ former finance chairman and political director.
After the Enquirer revealed the affair last October, then photographed Hunter eight months’ pregnant in December, Young came forward claiming that he was the father.
Young put Hunter up in Chapel Hill, NC, the hometown of Edwards and his cancer-stricken wife.
Young – a married father of three with a string of bounced-check busts and traffic violations in his past – set Hunter up in a rented house not far from his gated community and let her drive around in an SUV registered to him, the Enquirer wrote.
Hunter has also been supported by Fred Baron, Edwards’ former finance director, who is reportedly pays Hunter $15,000 a month and paid both Young and Hunter to get out of town once the baby was born.
Baron set Hunter, Young, Young’s wife and their three children up in a home they shared in Santa Barbara, Calif. – but tension in the household recently drove them apart.
“They lived in a single house most of the time and split to two houses recently,” Baron told The Post.
A neighbor of Hunter’s former Santa Barbara residence said that a moving van came about two weeks ago and that the property is now renting for $19,000 a month.
Edwards said his visit with Hunter on July 21 was prompted by a phone call from one of her friends asking for a meeting.
He didn’t tell his wife about the meeting in advance, he said, but waited until the next day – after Enquirer reporters cornered him in a bathroom as he exited the hotel.
Additional reporting by Susannah Cahalan, James Fanelli, Kathianne Boniello, Lorena Mongelli, Carolyn Salazar, Julie Kay and Post Wire Services
gotis@nypost.com