Andrew young (AP)
John Edwards charmed the sense right out of him.
A former top aide to the disgraced former senator admitted during testimony yesterday that he had a bro-mance with the presidential contender — and felt like a spurned lover when he was sucked into the coverup of the pol’s tawdry affair.
“You fell in love with John Edwards?” defense attorney Abbe Lowell asked Andrew Young in the first day of cross-examination.
“We all did. A lot of people in the country did,” Young admitted in Edwards’ criminal trial on charges he violated campaign finance laws to keep his mistress and baby mama, Rielle Hunter, a secret.
Defense attorneys tried to paint Young as a man whose heart was broken by Edwards — and now seeks revenge by trying to take him down.
It was one in a series of questions meant to discredit Young, the prosecution’s star witness.
Edwards reveled in Young’s six-hour grilling yesterday, saying it bolstered his defense.
“Oh, the sun is out in more ways than one,” he quipped as he left the courthouse.
Defense attorneys accused Young of bizarrely modeling himself after Edwards — even getting the same stonework on his house.
“He said he loved me and that he knew that I knew that he would never abandon me,” Young testified earlier yesterday.
The defense also brought up Young’s nickname for Elizabeth Edwards — Ursula, the villain in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” — as evidence he envied her.
But their relationship crumbled under the strain of keeping Hunter a secret — and Young’s fear that Edwards would no longer employ him.
“You fell out of love with him?” Lowell asked.
“I did, yes, sir,” replied Young.
“You really hate him, don’t you?” Lowell asked, referencing a later comment Young made to a journalist that he wanted to “sh-t on” Edwards’ head.
“I have mixed feelings,” deadpanned Young, whom Edwards’ staff had nicknamed “Rose Petal” to mock him for his devotion to Edwards.
At times, the aide’s dramatic testimony sounded like a blockbuster political thriller — culminating in a sweat-soaked final scene between the two on a dirt road in Chapel Hill, NC, in August 2008.
They met there because Edwards was paranoid the National Enquirer was tapping their phones.
Edwards was terrified because accountants for heiress “Bunny” Mellon — his primary donor who allegedly didn’t know she was funding Edwards’ efforts to cover up the affair — were asking about “funny checks,” Young testified.
Those checks were allegedly buying Hunter’s silence.
She got $40,000 in cash over eight months, Young said, adding that her child’s nanny totaled $3,400 and the furnishings for her temporary home cost $34,685.
But suddenly, during that encounter, Young suspected that Edwards was taping him.
“I felt like I was being tape recorded; he was acting very oddly,” Young said, adding that Edwards had broken out into a sweat.
Young testified he told Edwards that he had evidence of the coverup and that if he didn’t come clean to the American people, he would go public with the affair.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You can’t hurt me, Andrew, you can’t hurt me’ ” — and then the two parted ways, Young testified.
It was the last time they spoke.