admiration. Then I went from being a senator, a young senator, to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate, and becoming a national public figure. All of which fed a self-?focus, an egotism, a narcissism, that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You’re invincible. And there will be no consequences. And nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.
The reaction to the interview was swift and mostly harsh, and the Olympics did not keep the media from covering the story. News outlets around the world published excerpts. Editorial writers, columnists, and bloggers flayed the senator in their commentaries, and political types announced the death of his relevance in national affairs. It was very strange to see reporters offering detailed accounts of a story we had lived with for so long.
Later I heard of additional developments that never reached the public. For example, Edwards told me that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton phoned his wife to say they were sorry about what was happening and to tell her she was in their prayers. Bill Clinton, a veteran of his own sexual disgrace and attempted cover-?up, called the senator and said, in effect, “How’d you get caught?”
On the night of the Bob Woodruff interview, my phone rang constantly. Reporters from around the world were calling. I didn’t speak to one of them. My main concern was to protect Cheri and the kids from the cameras, and I was glad we were leaving for North Carolina in the morning. Then, at 10:33 P.M., Fred sent a text saying that he couldn’t send his plane because it was “in Guatemala with Lisa until Sunday-sorry-DO NOT talk to press!!!!!!!”
I logged on to the Web site FlightAware.com and checked to see where the plane was. The site, which tracks the whereabouts of every aircraft with a tail number, showed it was parked at Dallas Love Field. It was clear-Fred and John Edwards weren’t looking out for us anymore. I told Fred I knew where the plane was. He didn’t react to the fact that I had ›actcaught him in a lie but agreed we needed to travel covertly and offered to have a driver meet us near the Southwest Airlines arrival area when we landed in Raleigh-?Durham. Fortunately, no one was looking for us at the airport when we arrived late Saturday. If they had been, it would have been a cinch to find us. All they’d have had to do was stand near the limo driver holding a big sign that read, “Andrew Young.”
On the Sunday morning after the interview, Elizabeth Edwards again lashed out at Cheri with two messages left on her phone. The first said:
Andrew told Rielle that he was the person responsible for the PlayStation 3 fiasco. Rielle told on her boyfriend and told John that Andrew is the one who did it. Shouldn’t confide things to your boyfriend… or your girlfriend.
The second Sunday message said:
Hey, Cheri, um, yeah, uh, when you move from North Carolina, Andrew and Rielle both asked if they could please be really close together. Uh, hope you like that!
The flailing nature of these remarks-recalling the years-?old PlayStation issue, for example-reflected the paranoia that seemed to be falling over the Edwardses.
An army of media people had descended on Chapel Hill, and there were TV satellite trucks and photographers everywhere. My phone rang constantly with requests from Larry King, CBS News, Good Morning America, and every major newspaper and magazine in the country. On August 12, Fred Baron told me he believed that all the cell phones used by people close to the Edwardses were being “hit by the other side,” so he told me to use only landlines to call him.
Many months later, I can recall these anxious references and tell myself that Fred and the others were just upset and scaring themselves. At the time he spoke to me, Cheri and the kids and I were living four miles from the Edwardses’ mansion. We were in our yet-?to-?be-?finished house, where the floors and plumbing were not quite completed, and we were sleeping on mattresses thrown on the floor. Unsure about the future of my job, where we might live, and where the kids would start school, we felt besieged and insecure. Very few of our old friends and colleagues would talk to us. Our friend Michael Cucchiara told us that Elizabeth was writing a book that would be extremely harsh on me. Regarded as pariahs for our role in the destruction of John Edwards, we felt self-?conscious everywhere we went. However, we did try to keep a sense of humor.
When Cheri went to a grocery store, she grabbed t›, she National Enquirer at the check out and flipped it over so no one could see it. The man standing behind her said, “Hey, are you embarrassed that you are buying that magazine?” She turned and saw he had an armful of similar magazines. After a flash of fear, she realized that the man didn’t know she was one of the players in the scandal and she had to fight to keep from laughing out loud.
Laughs were a rare commodity for us in August 2008. Cheri didn’t have any friends, other than me, who knew what she was going through and could talk to her with real understanding and laugh at the ridiculous elements of the scandal. I was lucky to have Tim Toben. “I’ve never known anyone who could do this,” he would say. “John Edwards can convince and compel in such a genuine and honest-?seeming way but is really not authentic. He lies, but it’s like he believes it all and so do we.” His point made me think of the movie True Lies. That’s what John Edwards was all about- constructing lies that seemed like truth and had the power of truth, until he was found out.
My last encounter with Edwards came on August 18, when I got an urgent call from Fred Baron. He said that Mrs. Edwards had left the house and the senator would have access to David Kirby’s car for just a short time. He begged me to agree to see him. I was furious with Edwards and all the people around him, but I needed to meet with him to hear what he had worked out with Bunny on the matter of the big poverty foundation. When I agreed, Fred told me to drive to an intersection on a deserted two-?lane road near the Edwards estate. It was just before one o’clock in the afternoon. I got in our minivan, drove to the spot, and parked.
At 1:15 P.M., Fred sent me a text to tell me, “He is in a black suv.” Just then, Edwards pulled up in a black Chevy Tahoe and waved at me through the open window. I rolled down the window on the minivan, not knowing what to expect.
“Follow me,” he called out. Then he drove off.
I followed as he drove down the country roads, making one awkward turn after another. (He was talking on a cell phone and anxiously checking the rearview mirror as he drove the borrowed car.) Finally, he stopped and signaled for me to get in his car.
When I opened the door of the Tahoe, I saw that Edwards looked fit and tanned as usual, but when I got in I noticed he was fidgety, and as he drove off, he seemed to have a little trouble controlling the car and maintaining his train of thought.
Two months had passed since I’d last seen John Edwards, and in that time I had come to understand that I had never really known him at all. I began to worry just a bit about my own safety. In the movies, this would be the scene where the rich guy would deliver the man who knows too much to an assassin in the woods. I knew this was probably a paranoid thought, but it remained in the back of my mind as he actually tried a little small talk.
“How are you doing?” he said. ?› he0;How are the kids?”
“We’re doing pretty shitty,” I answered. “Where’s your car?”
“Elizabeth’s taken all my keys.”
“Elizabeth’s taken your keys?” I wanted to embarrass him by making him explain.
“Yeah, and she’s got me sleeping in the barn. She yells at me all night, and when I sleep she gets in my face and screams.”
As this line of conversation died, Edwards grew nostalgic. He said he missed hanging out with me. “I don’t have anyone to talk to anymore.”
I wasn’t interested in his loneliness. I asked him what he was going to do about me now that my reputation was trashed and I had no chance of finding a job. What about the foundation he was supposed to start with a big donation from Bunny Mellon? The last I heard, he was increasing his request to $50 million.
He said that when he saw Bunny, her lawyer and accountant had attended the meeting and told him she wasn’t in a position to give him what he wanted. The senator then started talking about the checks Bunny had written to cover Rielle’s expenses and the cost of our great escape.
“I didn’t know anything about this,” he said. “Did you?”
I didn’t know what was going on. I wondered if he was secretly recording our conversation. Panicked, I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“What about your promise to take care of things?” I asked him. “What about you coming clean?”
“If you apply for a job, I’ll give you a good reference. Just let me know who to call.”
After a decade of devoted service, untold sacrifice on the part of my wife and children, and an act of extreme loyalty that left my reputation ruined, John Edwards proposed to compensate me with a good reference. I could no longer contain myself. I looked at him and in dead seriousness said, “You know, I’m not sure we can really control what happens next.” I then explained that I had the sex video, a small library of pertinent text messages, voice-?mail recordings by the score, and contemporary notes I had made almost every day since I began working for him. If he wasn’t willing to clear my name by telling the truth, then I would do it.
“Andrew, I’ve told Elizabeth everything,” he said. “You can’t hurt me.”
With this statement› th, Edwards communicated two important things. First, in the strange universe he occupied, he and his wife were the only two beings who mattered. Second, he was a remorseless and predatory creature, unaffected by the suffering of others, even suffering he had caused with his reckless behavior. I told him to take me back to my car. When we got there I got out, closed the door of the Tahoe, and stepped aside. As he drove away, I stole one last glance through the window of the driver’s door. I saw a man I couldn’t recognize at all.
Almost a year would pass before I would be near John Edwards again, on a ball field where our two boys played for different teams, and he would look past me. I heard nothing from him directly in those ten months, but his wife would continue to bad-?mouth me and Cheri to folks in Chapel Hill and around the country. The worst of what she did was accuse me of trying to bilk a helpless old woman-Bunny Mellon-out of funds for a fake foundation her husband knew nothing about. She said this much and more in a voice-?mail message recorded and played for me by Tim Toben:
… I thought that perhaps you should know that John visited Bunny Mellon, Andrew Mellon’s widow, with whom Andrew had met in the course of fund-?raising. And Andrew apparently tried to… told her that Andrew was starting a foundation, that she needed to give several million dollars in cash to the foundation.
She said she didn’t have that cash, and he suggested that she should mortgage her property. She is ninety-?eight years old… she should mortgage her property for John’s foundation. The only problem is John didn’t have a foundation, did not ask Andrew to do anything. This was a totally bogus scam of a ninety-?eight-?year-?old woman.
The senator later told Tim that I had been setting up a fake foundation without his knowledge. Tim reminded him that they had actually discussed the foundation long ago over dinner, when Edwards was under consideration as the Democratic candidate for vice president. Tim recalled this because he had been impressed when Edwards explained that Bunny had said she was going to help him “be to poverty what Al Gore is to climate change.”
Despite the fact that Tim had revealed Edwards to be lying about me, the senator and his wife would continue to spread such stories about me for many months. They even accused me of stealing a baseball card collection that had belonged to their son. On the day Cheri and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary, Mrs. Edwards left a message on my phone that said, among other things:
Andrew, it’s Elizabeth, mother of Wade, who wants ›adeWade’s cards back. I know that you took them… they gave lie detector tests to everybody else… it leaves you… Are you that low that you would steal from a dead boy?
(For the record, Elizabeth knew the police had arrested someone who tried to pawn the cards. When she couldn’t identify the cards in detail, he had to be released.)
Five days after Elizabeth Edwards left her final message, Fred Baron died. In 2009, Elizabeth published a book that she called a reflection on “facing life’s adversities.” In it I was no longer the young man she asked to be “family.” I was some sort of deranged groupie or “obsessed fan.” When I read this I was hurt, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. The FBI and federal prosecutors had been to my home to talk about an investigation of the Edwards campaign. With the help of David Geneson, a brilliant and compassionate lawyer, I began putting together all the records they requested for a grand jury that had been convened.
Edwards started telling people he wanted to “get this baby mess” behind him so he could return to national politics. He and his wife continued to tell people that I was responsible for all their problems, from the failure of his campaign to the discord in their marriage. As my grand jury testimony approached, few of our old friends even spoke to us. Among the notable exceptions were Glenn Sturm, a former big Edwards supporter, and my brother-?in-?law, Joe Von Kallist. These two stood up for us when no one else would and immediately offered to represent me pro bono. Glenn spoke to me several times a day and would even fly us to his ranch in Wyoming for a break.
