Senator haunted by spurned wife’s rage
New York – The man who talked of two Americas ended up living two lives.
The John Edwards who reached for the White House and spoke so eloquently of the gap between rich and poor has long departed the political stage; in his place is John Edwards, the adulterer who will learn this week if his lies and deceptions will land him in jail.
After three weeks of gruelling testimony in one of the most tawdry political trials to soil an American court, the former senator from North Carolina and sometime Democratic presidential candidate is waiting for a jury’s verdict on charges that he illegally diverted election funds to hide an affair with a woman who bore him an illegitimate child.
Edwards faces up to 30 years in jail for alleged conspiracy and other campaign finance offences. Yet his lawyer claimed last week that the 58-year-old former politician was already serving a ‘‘life sentence’’ for the ‘‘sins’’ he committed against his family, most notably his betrayal of his late wife, Elizabeth.
Of all the sensational revelations that have emerged from the twisted tale of the 2008 presidential campaign, none was more cruel and depressing than the moment his wife confronted him in a desolate aircraft hangar as he was about to board a private jet.
For a few moments earlier this month, nobody in that North Carolina courtroom was thinking of campaign finance, political ambition, or legal procedure.
It was suddenly October 2007, and the rage and grief of a broken wife echoed across the years.
On the witness stand was Elizabeth Reynolds, 37, a close friend of Elizabeth Edwards, who was fighting a losing battle with breast cancer yet continued to campaign for her husband.
In the summer of that year, Reynolds testified, Elizabeth had found a mobile phone containing evidence that her husband was having an affair with Rielle Hunter, a junior aide who was compiling a video record of Edwards’ campaign.
Edwards had promised his wife that the affair was over, but on October 10, the National Enquirer tabloid reported that it was still going on.
The next day Edwards was preparing to fly from Raleigh airport, when his wife arrived and exploded with rage. Aides watched in silence as she screamed abuse at her husband. ‘‘She stormed off and sort of collapsed in a ball,’’ Reynolds told the court.
Elizabeth then returned to the hangar and shouted at her husband: ‘‘You don’t see me any more, you’re not seeing me.’’ As Edwards stood mute, Reynolds continued, Elizabeth ‘‘took off her shirt and bra’’, revealing her surgery-scarred breasts.
‘‘Even I didn’t believe what he was saying [about the affair],’’ testified Jennifer Palmieri, Edwards’ former campaign spokeswoman. When Edwards denied paternity of Hunter’s baby daughter a few months later, Palmieri added, ‘‘I believed John was continuing to lie and trying to drag me into it.’’
Palmieri wept as she described Elizabeth’s grief at the breakdown of her marriage just after her doctors told her that the cancer had spread to her bones.
‘‘Elizabeth was concerned that when she died, there would not be a man who loved her there,’’ Palmieri said.
In the event, Edwards was present when his wife died in 2010, but by then his political career was over and few in America seem likely to forgive him.
Elizabeth had proved a popular campaigner after her husband was chosen as Senator John Kerry’s vicepresidential running mate in the 2004 election.