While on a media blitz to promote her new book (out today) where she lays bare all the details about her affair with John Edwards, Rielle Hunter announced that and the former Senator split last week.
Although they spent Father’s Day weekend together at the beach (Edwards was photographed kissing Rielle,) she told GMA this morning:
“We are a family, but as of the end of last week John Edwards and I are no longer a couple. Not at all. We decided together to end it. It’s hard, it’s painful.”
Even though in the book, she seems to have little remorse about having an affair with a married man (who’s wife is dying of cancer) she now wishes she could do things differently. She told George Stephanopoulos that if she could do it again, she would not tell John Edwards upon meeting him “You’re hot!”
“Many things in the relationship were a mistake but I don’t regret loving him.”
Rielle also hinted that their split might have been a direct result of her book, and all her media attention. “For me, for my part in it, it’s because I’m no longer interested in hiding, hiding our relationship, not living out.”
She’s definitely not hiding. There are a few reasons why John might be interested in hiding, though. There’s the thing where Rielle’s book paints an unflattering picture of his wife Elizabeth Edwards, who passed away from cancer last year. Then there’s this other thing where he was recently acquitted in a harrowing federal corruption trial for allegedly using campaign funds to hide his relationship with Rielle from the public.
Here’s a few quotes from her book What Really Happened:
“Because there wasn’t any physical or emotional intimacy between Johnny and Elizabeth, I had absolutely no jealous feelings about her. The ‘wife as innocent victim’ did not match the reality.”
“I felt miserable for Elizabeth and what she must be experiencing, but my loyalties were with Johnny.”
She rationalized having an affair with him because he told her he was seeing three other women (which was a lie he told her to make her think she wasn’t the only one:)
“He told me that he had an entire hidden life that had gone on for decades and that he was currently involved with three different women. One lived in Los Angeles, one in Florida and one in Chicago. Clearly this behavior of his was not going to change overnight.”
On Elizabeth Edwards: “A witch on wheels,” “Crazy,” and “Venomous.”
