For the first time, John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter has revealed how the illicit lovers slept together the night they met — and claims the presidential candidate predicted the wild romp would cause his premature ejection from politics. VIDEO: Rielle Hunter Photoshoot
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“Falling in love with you could really f- – – up my plans for becoming president,” Edwards told vixen videographer Rielle Hunter after their sexual tryst at Manhattan’s Regency hotel in February 2006.
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Edwards was scared to death of his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, fearing if she knew the truth, “he would be pummeled.” The then-presidential candidate hoped Hunter, pregnant with his child, would get an abortion.
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Contrary to various accounts of their affair, Hunter, 45, told the magazine she met the former North Carolina senator on the corner of 61st Street and Park Avenue in February 2006, and did not pick him up at a bar.
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She had spotted him earlier in the lounge of The Regency hotel, but they did not speak.
“I did not know who he was,” Hunter said. “The John Edwards I saw in 2004 on TV I believed to be a disconnected, two-dimensional geek kind of guy. And the man sitting across the room was not that at all.”
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“Andrew [Young] gave me money because he felt I shouldn’t be using my own money to travel to see Johnny,” she said. “Andrew always wanted to ‘take care of everything.’ ”
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Hunter said she learned she was pregnant in July 2007 — and that Edwards also knew, even before he and his wife publicly renewed their vows.
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She said he told her he would support her if she kept the baby. But “on some level, he was hoping I would get an abortion,” she said. “He wasn’t happy about the timing. Which is understandable. He was married and running for president.”
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Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, had no trouble lying to his wife, to his country and to himself, but Hunter insisted he would never lie to her.
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Edwards finally admitted in January that he was the father of her 2-year-old daughter, Frances Quinn. Hunter said she waited until he came clean to tell her side of the story.
“I didn’t feel like I could ever speak until he did that,” she said. “Because had I spoken, I would have emasculated him. And I could not emasculate him.”
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John Edwards is seen seated next to Rielle Hunter on a plane from New Hampshire to Reno, Nev. Dec. 29, 2006.
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Although she has been portrayed as a scheming seductress, Hunter said Edwards was the one who seduced her. “I’m not a predator, I’m not a gold digger, I’m not the stalker. I didn’t have any power in that way in our relationship,” she said. “He held all the power.”
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