Edwards portrayed as a liar and a deceiver
Admits to sin, but not to any crime
Two portraits of John Edwards emerged in opening arguments at the trial of the disgraced politician, who is accused of breaking campaign finance laws by accepting more than $900,000 in illegal contributions to help conceal an extramarital affair during his 2008 bid for president.
The prosecution portrayed Edwards on Monday as a liar and a deceiver who went to great lengths to cover up his affair in order to protect his campaign image as a family man.
The defence portrayed him as a man who committed a sin — a sin Edwards acknowledges — but did not break the law.
The former senator from North Carolina has pleaded not guilty to six criminal counts related to campaign finance violations.
He was joined in the courtroom Monday by his parents and his daughter Cate.
Prosecutors contend that bills paid by two Edwards benefactors were unreported campaign contributions designed to cover up Edwards’ affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, which went on even as Edwards’ wife was battling cancer.
Hunter gave birth to Edwards’ daughter in 2008, but the affair was not widely publicized until later that year. Edwards did not acknowledge paternity of the child until 2010. Elizabeth Edwards died that year.
“Humiliation” is the word Allison Van Laningham, one of Edwards’s attorneys, scrawled on a courtroom blackboard as she argued that Edwards had attempted to avoid humiliating himself and his family with public disclosure of his infidelity.
What Edwards did“maybe a sin, but it is not a federal election crime,” Van Laningham told the jury of seven women and nine men.
“Follow the money,” she said, suggesting that former Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young, the prosecution’s star witness, is trying to profit off Edwards’ troubles.