Me-ow!
John Edwards’ nasty mistress cattily dissed his cancer-stricken wife to a friend – and later coldly blamed the ailing spouse for getting her fired from a videography job on her lover’s presidential campaign, a new report claims.
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“She does not give off good energy,” Rielle Hunter sneered of Elizabeth Edwards during a late 2006 lunch with Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman, who was covering the campaign at the time.
“She didn’t make eye contact with me.”
Several months later, when Hunter was booted from her $100,000-plus job filming “Webisodes” on Edwards’ campaign, she blasted Elizabeth Edwards, sniping, “Someday, the truth about her is going to come out,” Darman wrote.
Hunter, 42, soon told the scribe she also was working on a “genius” TV-show idea involving “women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them.”
When Hunter met with Darman again last summer, he asked her if she was dating anyone, and she allegedly replied, “I’m in love.”
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Coyly refusing to identify her beau, Hunter added, “I can’t tell you [who], but maybe someday we’ll all be friends,” Darman recounted. Edwards claims their relationship ended in 2006.
It’s not clear what the political fallout from the affair will be. But Edwards announced “through one of his staffers he would not be attending the [Democratic] convention in Denver,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Hunter had a thing for blabbing to writers. At a party about five years ago, she told a writer in California, “I am going to be famous, rich and famous. I’m going to meet a rich, powerful man.”
“How are you going to do that?” asked Sarah Miller, who wrote about the conversation in the Los Angeles Times.
Hunter replied, “I’m going to manifest it.”
An adherent of New Age spirituality and astrology, Hunter claimed that she has had many past lives, Darman said.
Hunter told Darman that when she met John Edwards, 55, in the bar of New York’s Regency Hotel in 2006, he gave off a special “energy.”
Later, Hunter claimed that the former North Carolina senator could become a “transformational leader” – comparable to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Darman said.
“He had the power to change the world,” Hunter told the writer.
Edwards – pressured to come clean about his dealings with Hunter after vehemently denying an affair – finally admitted to their trysts on ABC’s “Nightline.”
But the former White House hopeful and 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee denied fathering Hunter’s daughter, Frances Quinn Hunter, who was born in late February.
No father is listed by name on Frances’ birth certificate, but Edwards’ former campaign honcho, Andrew Young – a married father of three – has claimed he sired the child.
Edwards has offered to take a paternity test, but Hunter, who has gone into hiding, has said she will not subject her daughter to one.
The National Enquirer, which broke the story of the Edwards-Hunter affair last year, is set to report that it has evidence contradicting Edwards’ recent denials that he fathered Frances.
The tabloid also reported that Hunter is still being paid a reported $15,000 per month by Edwards’ campaign-finance boss, Fred Baron, and the former candidate’s affair with her lasted beyond 2006. Campaign records show that Baron was paid $389,698 by the Edwards campaign – and another $57,428 in February, when Frances was born.
“We’ve caught him, basically, in a new pack of lies,” National Enquirer executive editor Barry Levine told The Post yesterday.
Levine said sources are telling the Enquirer that Hunter “doesn’t want to do any more damage to John Edwards” by agreeing to a paternity test.
“She’s still in love with him and actually believes that when all of this is said and done, they actually will be together,” Levine said.
Hunter’s former business partner, Mimi Hockman, refused to talk about the New Age mistress to reporters at her New Jersey home.
“The dog bites,” said Hockman while holding a cocker spaniel.
Additional reporting by C.J. Sullivan