After two years of silence, Rielle Hunter fires back

John Edwards' former mistress shares her side of the affair - and some skin - in a "doozy" of an interview with GQ.

Readers got a second-hand earful about Rielle Hunter in two recent books. Now, the woman best known for bearing the child of former presidential candidate John Edwards has shared her side of the story – or, at least, 10,000 words worth of it. As the Washington Post put it, “it’s a doozy.”

The Post ran glamour-girl photos and quotes from an interview Hunter gave to GQ magazine, where she presents a counterpoint to “The Politician,” by campaign aide Andrew Young, and to “Resilience,” by the candidate’s now-estranged wife, Elizabeth Edwards. The former, as the paper put it, had portrayed Hunter as a “loony, needy, loose cannon,” and the latter considered her “an aggressive home-wrecker”.

I personally had preferred Hunter’s two years of “quiet dignity” to the bare-midriffed, bare-legged GQ photos, and yet I did appreciate hearing some words from a woman who has been spoken about so often by others. From a bookkeeping standpoint, though, I found this tidbit from the Post fascinating: The writer who interviewed Hunter for GQ, Lisa DePaulo, had also been briefly hired as a ghostwriter on Young’s memoir.

“That connection, later severed, was not disclosed in the GQ article,” The Post said. “DePaulo told us she signed a confidentiality agreement with Young, which prevented her from discussing the work they'd done -- all of which, she said, was separate from her work with Hunter, whom she first approached via mutual friends in December, six months after her last contact with Young.”

Nothing is ever as straightforward as it looks in the world of politics and scandal. At this point, I wouldn’t even bet on whether Hunter will be moving forward with a memoir of her own.

Rebekah Denn blogs at eatallaboutit.com.

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