Who is Rielle Hunter?
By on
July 22nd, 2008
Who is the “formerly hard-partying girl who claims that she found enlightenment” who met John Edwards in a bar and was paid six digits by the campaign to make videos of him that “lingers over the former senator’s behind as he tucks a starched white shirt into his pants,” and why is the campaign suddenly hiding the webvideos she made of Edwards on questionable legal grounds? Mickey Kaus is curious after reading this Sam Stein post. Separately, Garance Franke-Ruta notes the irony of Edwards stumping the SEIU for votes and donations on the leftist union’s “Lobby Day.”
Rielle Hunter, wannabe actress/producer (aspiring double threat!), was paid $114,461 by Edwards’ One America Committee to produce a series of “webisodes” introducing people to the casual, “authentic” John Edwards. Why they picked this lady to make these videos is unclear — she really didn’t have much experience doing anything beyond being, in the words of Jay McInerney, “an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year old.” That was a couple years ago, though. Now she’s a 44-year-old former all of those things, and a weirdo new agey spiritualist flake, according to her website.
Did John Edwards Sleep with this Lady?
“Formerly, Hunter was known as Lisa Druck…”
The way I remember it, I first met Rielle Hunter in a nightclub called Nells in early 1987, although the circumstances of our first meeting seem to be in dispute. In my defense I can only say that events of that decade are not always as clearly etched in memory as we might wish, and neither of us was living a very sober or reflective life back then. At that time Rielle’s name was Lisa Druck, and when she wasn’t out at nightclubs she was taking acting classes. We dated for only a few months, but in that period I spent a lot of time with Lisa and her friends, whose behavior intrigued and appalled me to such an extent that I ended up basing a novel on the experience. The novel was called Story of My Life, and it was narrated in the first person from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine- addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa. I certainly thought of Alison Poole as a sympathetic and ultimately endearing character. One of her most striking traits was her obsession with truth-telling and her horror of being lied to, something that I certainly took directly from Lisa. When Lisa moved to Calfornia and got married I lost track of her, though I was reminded of her whenever someone would ask me, at book signings and lectures, what I imagined happened to Alison Poole after the book ended — whether I saw her as turning her life around or not. Through the grapevine I picked up occasional reports from the West Coast. I heard that Lisa had changed her name to Rielle, that she’d gotten divorced, and that she was increasingly engaged in various spiritual quests which she attempted to explain to me when I finally ran into her; all I could tell for certain was that she was a far happier person than I remembered. Recently she returned to Manhattan and one sunny afternoon in Washington Square Park, attempted to enlighten me on the subject of her own enlightenment.
Popularity: 1% [?]
