Of course, we’re speaking about John Edwards, the disgraced politician not John Edward, the pysch who communicates with your dead great-grandmother for a family recipe.

She saw a Gandhi in Edwards
img: via Hollywood Gossip

Newsweek’s Johnathan Darman, who covered the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004, recounts his encounters with John Edwards’ other woman Reille Hunter. [NewsWeek]

When Edwards finally confessed to the affair, he gave the timeline as 2006. [Wiki article]

Recounts Darman: [Newsweek]

It was July 7, 2006. I’d been sent to Iowa to write a piece on John Edwards. We were on our way to Des Moines, where I would be the only national reporter following him around the state for two days. From a few rows back, I tried to observe Edwards before the plane took off. Most of the other passengers seemed to have no idea who Edwards was. But this blond woman, putting away her bags, was visibly captivated by him. She tried repeatedly to engage him in conversation, but he seemed uninterested in talking.

Uninterested in talking, or trying to avoid public attention? Because as we’ll see later in this story, he probably already knew her at this point.

Darman also reminisces when Reilly Hunter actually turned some heads and got tongues wagging when she tagged along with Edwards’ team as a movie maker.

She showed up at his first event that day in Des Moines with a video camera. She was trying to get as close to the candidate as she could. “Does she work for the campaign?” I asked Edwards’s press secretary, Kim Rubey. “Oh, she’s working on a documentary project,” said Rubey. “We’re not sure if it’s going to work out.” But it was soon clear that she was on Team Edwards. When it came time to drive to the next event, she rode in the car with the candidate. I drove behind in a rental car.

Darman then decided to chat up with this woman, to find more about her. He discovered that she was a bored New-York socialite ………..

She’d been a New York party girl, she’d been married and divorced, she’d been a seeker and a teacher and was a firm believer in the power of truth.

how she was working as a documentary-film maker, living with a friend in South Orange, N.J., but how she’d previously had “many lives.”

…. who was starting to dabble in new-age spiritualism and the fancy jargon that goes with it.

She’d worked, she said, as an actress and as a spiritual adviser. She was fiercely devoted to astrology and New Age spirituality.

At this point, you can already see the path this is going down on.

Remember when we talked earlier in this post about how Edwards and Hunter were not two strangers meeting on a plane?

She told me that she had met Edwards at a bar, at the Regency Hotel in New York.

And why did she continue pursuing him?

She thought he was giving off a special “energy.”

Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this (new-age spiritualism), to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.
Her latest project was John Edwards.

So she was an enabler, nothing wrong with that.

Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential. The real John Edwards, she believed, was a brilliant, generous, giving man who was driven by competing impulses—to feed his ego and serve the world.

And all this to what purpose? Ready, or not, here it comes.

If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less, he had the power to be a “transformational leader” on par with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. “He has the power to change the world,” she said.

The reason this story resonated with me was because Gandhi, as remarkable of a political leader he was, was notorious for unusual sexual shenanigans in his personal life – from his vow of celibacy as a married man, to his (non-)tryst with a prostitute, to his experimentations on sexual self-control with younger women. (reliable online links to these incidents needed)

Whether Rielle Hunter was able to transform John Edwards into a political leader of the stature of Gandhi, only history will tell, and right now I’m betting against it.

But she did achieve something. Remember her goal?
“If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less”
Edwards did use his head less and tapped something.

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