Posted on 08/11/2008 4:11:30 AM PDT by IbJensen
Rielle Hunter compared John Edwards with Gandhi and went around trashing his cancer-stricken wife, it was reported Sunday.
A Newsweek writer who courted her as a source during Hunter's affair with the presidential candidate portrays Edwards' mistress as a charming but hugely indiscreet muddlehead who called reporters with New Age babble about Edwards' "old soul."
Asked about Elizabeth Edwards, who is unusually well-liked by political operatives and reporters, Hunter told reporter Jonathan Darman, "She does not give off good energy. ... I've only met her once.... She didn't make eye contact with me."
Darman wrote of meeting Hunter, a former yoga instructor hired by the Edwards campaign to shoot Web videos, at a campaign event in 2006 and later getting an e-mail from her, saying she had a story for him.
The story she wanted printed was that Edwards was "an old soul" with a "special energy" who could be a transformational leader like Mahatma Gandhi or the Martin Luther King Jr. if he used his heart more and his head less.
"Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves," Darman wrote - underscoring yet again the candidate's stunning lack of judgment.
Darman said he asked, "Do you talk about this stuff with the candidate?"
Hunter's reply: "All the time."
Darman wrote a small story about Edwards hiring a woman he had met in a bar that appeared in the Dec. 25, 2006, issue of Newsweek.
When he saw her again a few weeks later, Hunter said she'd been fired by the campaign and blamed Elizabeth Edwards.
"'Someday,' Rielle said, 'the truth about her is going to come out,'" Darman wrote.
In the summer of 2007 - long after the affair was over, according to Edwards, and several months after Elizabeth Edwards got a grim cancer diagnosis that gave her only a few years to live - Hunter told Darman she was dating a mystery man she couldn't name.
Freelance writer Sarah Miller, describing meeting Hunter at a party in Los Angeles some years ago, said Hunter was scatter-brained but ambitious.
"I am going to be famous," she declared, according to Miller's account in the Los Angeles Times. "Rich and famous. I am going to meet a rich, powerful man."
Miller said Hunter, who talked of energies in the air, said she would accomplish this feat by "manifesting it."
In a bizarre case of six degrees of scandal separation, Hunter was married in the 1990s to Kip Hunter, son of the Colorado district attorney who famously led the failed JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation. They divorced in 1999.
In confessing his affair Friday, Edwards told ABC he doesn't think his political career is over, but his chances of being asked to reprise his 2004 veep run, serve in the cabinet or even address the Democratic convention are now less than zero.
Edwards, who scored more than 60 delegates and came in third behind Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in his bid for the White House, confirmed he won't even attend the Democratic convention in two weeks.
Mimi Hockman, Hunter's business partner, told reporters gathered outside her South Orange, N.J., house: "Don't waste your time. I'm contractually prohibited from talking to you."
hkennedy@nydailynews.com
Adultry is one thing; adultry with a mental case is worse!
You have to wonder if her cancer really was just a ruse to get sympathy for Edwards' campaign. She's every bit as much of a political animal as he is.
Anybody smell boiling bunny?
“And how much of a soul does Andrew Young’s wife have??”
I read somewhere that this Hunter chick LIVED with the Young’s in CA for awhile! There is NO WAY a wife allowed that crap if her husband really was the “babydaddy.”
Elizabeth Edwards-
She too has sold her soul.
I wonder if Young is the NE informant?
Well, at least edwards is having to shell out some of that ill-gotten fortune.
Gotta love the irony in life!
Leni
LOL! True. True. They do tend to be a rather rara avis, don't they? 
Maybe if Rielle was carrying the “Love Child” at the time, Elizabeth would have reacted better...
Yeah, that’ll do it!
Sloppy seconds?No, doesn't know how to spell quoted.
Rielle probably plays with the curtains and chats on the phone.
Perhaps he wore diapers in order to generate some mothering.
“I read somewhere that this Hunter chick LIVED with the Young’s in CA for awhile! There is NO WAY a wife allowed that crap if her husband really was the “babydaddy.””
During a TV interview with a National Enquirer spokesman this past weekend, he said they have proof that BOTH the Youngs visit or visited Hunter regularly. The guy said something like: Now what wife, along with her husband, would visit his mistress and his baby routinely? In other words, John Edwards is the father.
No matter what, I bet he never marries her. Guys get really stupid if they think there is some sex obtainable.
Say it ain't so!
Can't blame you for not knowing, as it was an unwatchable TV show, unless you think that kind of airheadedness is cute.
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