In sex scandal, Edwards braced for media onslaught that never came

Two weeks before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, the National Enquirer published a detailed story reporting that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had had an affair, and that the woman involved, campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, was pregnant, and that Edwards had arranged for an aide to falsely claim to be the father, and that Hunter and the aide and the aide’s family were being taken care of financially by a wealthy Edwards backer. At the time, Edwards was a real contender in the Democratic presidential race, so when the Enquirer story was published, the Edwards camp prepared for what some believed would be an onslaught of media scrutiny. But it didn’t come. At the time, Edwards thought he had outsmarted the watchdogs of the press, frustrating their best attempts to uncover the story. But it later turned out that many journalists just didn’t want to report the news and hadn’t tried very hard to uncover the facts.

The tale is told in the new book The Politician, by former Edwards aide and confidant Andrew Young, the man who, at Edwards’ insistence, claimed that he, and not the candidate, was the father of Hunter’s child.

By mid-December 2007, Edwards knew the Enquirer story was coming. With Iowa fast approaching, he came up with the cover-up scheme to identify Young as the father of the child. “I would work with a lawyer named Pam Marple, who was recommended by [Edwards backer] Fred Baron, to craft a statement to release to the media,” Young writes. The Edwards camp expected the Enquirer story to attract a lot of attention, but Edwards believed that having Young claim paternity would deflect any blame from the candidate himself. “It’s going to be a one-day story, Andrew,” Edwards told Young, according to Young’s account. “No offense, but the press doesn’t give a s–t about you. They want me. But if we give them a story they can understand, a story about two staffers, they’ll go away.”

So the statement was drafted:

As confirmed by Ms. Hunter, Andrew Young is the father of her unborn child. Senator Edwards knew nothing about the relationship between these former co-workers, which began when they worked together in 2006. As a private citizen who no longer works for the campaign, Mr. Young asks that the media respect his privacy while he works to make amends with his family.

It was an absolutely preposterous lie, but Edwards decided to go ahead. “This single paragraph was to be offered to the National Enquirer or any other media person who called the Edwards campaign about Rielle Hunter,” writes Young. “The senator and the advisers who worked closely with him on this issue — Jonathan Prince and Mark Kornblau — expected the onslaught to begin on Wednesday, December 19, when the new edition of the Enquirer would be posted online.” In anticipation of a firestorm, Young sent his family out of town.

But when the Enquirer story was published, nothing much happened. “To our relief, no serious newspaper or TV network picked up the story because they couldn’t find a source to confirm it,” Young writes. “Our phones and those of our friends and relatives rang constantly with calls from reporters and producers, but we ignored them all. Rielle and the campaign followed the same strategy, and since they still play by the multi-source rule, the big print and broadcast news organizations were stymied.” The damage was confined to a few websites. “We began to think that perhaps our strategy had worked,” Young writes.

What followed was an insane series of events in which Baron shelled out enormous amounts of money to fly Hunter and the Youngs around the country to keep them out of sight until the Iowa caucuses, and then the New Hampshire primary, and then, after the campaign fizzled but Edwards still had hopes of making it onto the Democratic presidential ticket, until Hunter had the baby.

But the Enquirer was not finished with the story. In July 2008, the tabloid published a detailed account of Edwards’ visit with Hunter and the baby at a Los Angeles hotel. “Andrew, they caught me,” a tearful Edwards is quoted as telling Young in a phone conversation. “It’s all over.”

Surely now, Young thought, the press would jump on the story. But it didn’t happen, at least not quickly. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the broadcast networks and the cable news outlets — none reported the story. And yet this time it bubbled up, from the blogs to talk radio to late-night television. By the second week of August, Edwards appeared on ABC News to semi-confess.

An explosive scandal had been kept out of the press for months at a time when the man at the center of it was an important player in national politics. Why? Young thought it was because the Edwards camp so tightly controlled information that journalists weren’t able to find sources to corroborate the Enquirer’s reporting. Perhaps that was part of it. But the fact was, many editors and reporters just didn’t want to tell the story. They admired Elizabeth Edwards. They saw no good in exposing John Edwards’ sordid acts. They looked down on the National Enquirer. An account in the New York Times openly confessed the paper’s “lack of interest” in the story. One Times editor told the paper’s ombudsman that the Edwards story was “classically not a Times-like story,” and the Times’ top editor, Bill Keller, explained that the “hold-your-nose quality about the Enquirer” helped account for the paper’s reluctance not just to publish but to even look into the story. “In the case of John Edwards,” said Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, “even though it was clearly out there, everybody in America knew about this well before CNN and The New York Times and The Washington Post got into this game — there was still a great reluctance.”

Of course, in the end the story came out anyway. But only after the sheer weight of Edwards’ corruption made the facts impossible to ignore.

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