John Edwards’ mistress has revealed for the first time how the illicit lovers fell in lust and slept together the night they met — and claims the presidential candidate predicted the wild romp would cause his premature ejection from politics.
“Falling in love with you could really f- – – up my plans for becoming president,” Edwards told vixen videographer Rielle Hunter after their sexual tryst at Manhattan’s Regency hotel in February 2006.
In her bombshell interview with GQ, Hunter says:
* Her first words to him were “You’re so hot” — and they had sex later that night in his hotel room.
* Edwards was scared to death of his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, fearing if she knew the truth, “he would be pummeled.”
* The then-presidential candidate hoped Hunter, pregnant with his child, would get an abortion.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AT GQ.COM
Contrary to various accounts of their affair, Hunter, 45, told the magazine she met the former North Carolina senator on the corner of 61st Street and Park Avenue in February 2006, and did not pick him up at a bar.
She had spotted him earlier in the lounge of The Regency hotel, but they did not speak.
“I did not know who he was,” Hunter said. “The John Edwards I saw in 2004 on TV I believed to be a disconnected, two-dimensional geek kind of guy. And the man sitting across the room was not that at all.”
After learning who he was, she gave her business card to one of Edwards’ aides.
“It said, ‘Rielle Hunter. Being is free,’ ” she recalled.
Edwards, 56, later looked for her at the lounge and was disappointed she was gone, she said.
“So when he walked around the corner [again] and saw me standing there, he lit up like a Christmas tree. And I thought his reaction when he saw me was just so cute,” she said. “I mean, he looked like a little kid at Christmas. And I just uttered to him, ‘You’re so hot.’ And he said, ‘Why, thank you!’ And he almost jumped into my arms. Literally.”
Later that night, Hunter said, he invited her to his hotel room.
She said she told the friends she was with, ” ‘I won’t sleep with him.’ And so I went over to his room, and I walked in. And I. Was. Terrified. Because I had never experienced anything like what was flowing between us.”
“Come closer. I won’t bite you,” Edwards beckoned.
“There was so much attraction and so much — I want to say love,” she said. “And, um, I eventually walked over to his side of the room. He was pretty relentless. And that’s all I’m gonna say on that.”
That was Feb. 21.
Over the next four days, “we talked on the phone almost every night for four hours,” she said, and by then, she was “head-over-heels in love.”
To keep their affair secret from his wife, Hunter bought a second cellphone for Edwards — identical to his regular one — for her to call him on.
She said Elizabeth Edwards, 60, learned of the relationship after discovering the second phone and dialing the last number called.
“I answered the phone and said, ‘Hey, baby,’ ” Hunter said. “And, click. And then [Elizabeth] confronted him and confronted him, and he finally confessed.”
Hunter said she learned she was pregnant in July 2007 — and that Edwards also knew, even before he and his wife publicly renewed their vows.
She said he told her he would support her if she kept the baby.
But “on some level, he was hoping I would get an abortion,” she said. “He wasn’t happy about the timing. Which is understandable. He was married and running for president.”
Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, had no trouble lying to his wife, to his country and to himself, but Hunter insisted he would never lie to her.
Unlike the way he feels about estranged wife Elizabeth, “he’s not afraid of me,” Hunter said.
“He’ll tell me anything and everything. He has no fear that I’m going to abuse him.”
Elizabeth Edwards, on the other hand, was routinely abusive, Hunter said. “I believe what happened in his marriage is, he could not go to his wife and say, ‘We have an issue.’ Because he would be pummeled,” she said.
“Most of his mistakes or errors in judgment were because of his fear of the wrath of Elizabeth . . . And you know, the wrath of Elizabeth is a mighty wrath.”
Although she has been portrayed as a scheming seductress, Hunter said Edwards was the one who seduced her. “I’m not a predator, I’m not a gold digger, I’m not the stalker. I didn’t have any power in that way in our relationship,” she said. “He held all the power.”
When Edwards denied he was the baby’s father in interviews and his aide Andrew Young came forward to claim paternity, Hunter said she was heartbroken but understood.
Edwards “was traumatized,” she said. “Because he had been living a life that was now exposed. A hidden life, when it is exposed, is a traumatic event for the person going through it. And they’re not in their right mind.”
She said Young was willing to take the fall for Edwards because “Andrew was in love with Johnny.
“In love with him. Beyond. And I believe he loved Johnny more than he loved [his own wife] Cheri, so Johnny was the third person in their relationship.”
Hunter said she received financial assistance through Young, but insisted she was never paid “hush money.”
“Andrew gave me money because he felt I shouldn’t be using my own money to travel to see Johnny,” she said. “Andrew always wanted to ‘take care of everything.’ ”
She refused to talk about the purported sex tape of Edwards and a pregnant Hunter that is now at the center of a legal battle involving her and Young.
Edwards finally admitted in January that he was the father of her 2-year-old daughter, Frances Quinn. Hunter said she waited until he came clean to tell her side of the story.
“I didn’t feel like I could ever speak until he did that,” she said. “Because had I spoken, I would have emasculated him. And I could not emasculate him.”
Despite everything they have been through and the pain he has caused her, Hunter said her love for Edwards is “unconditional” — and indicated she hopes they’ll be together forever at some point.
“We love each other very much,” she said. “And that hasn’t changed, and I believe that will be till death do us part. The love doesn’t go away.”