SHAWN ROCCO - shawn.rocco@newsobserver.com
Rielle Hunter, the former mistress of John Edwards, leaves the federal courthouse in Raleigh on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009. Hunter was on hand as federal investigators and a grand jury examined Edward's finances when he was a presidential candidate. Hunter is carrying her daughter, Frances Quinn Hunter.
During my 37 years of covering Tar Heel politics, I have known plenty of politicians with a roving eye. Big egos, nights away from home, and political groupies provide a lot of temptation.
But former Sen. John Edwards never had a reputation as a skirt chaser while he was in Raleigh. He was known as a workaholic lawyer who would hit the soccer fields with his kids in his spare time, not the bars cruising for women.
Even so, there were rumors. As early as 2003, I asked Edwards about a rumored affair from his days as a big-time trial lawyer. Edwards denied it. His campaign spokeswoman called my boss to complain that in all of the years of working in the Clinton White House she had never heard such off-base questions. One of his chief political advisers threw me out of his office the next day.
From that point on, the Edwards campaign treated me as a hostile reporter. To this day, I don't know whether Edwards had an affair with the woman in question.
Proving sexual affairs is a difficult business, even if one is willing to engage in peephole journalism.
Usually one party has to acknowledge the affair, or the liaison is documented in legal proceedings such as a divorce or child custody fight. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford acknowledged his affair after returning from an unexplained absence in Argentina. New York Gov. Elliott Spitzer's relationship with a call girl was disclosed during a federal investigation into another matter. New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey's affair came out when he put his boyfriend on the state payroll.
Some readers have wondered why it was The National Enquirer, and not some other news organization, that broke the Edwards sex scandal.
The Enquirer stories began in October 2007, bit by bit laying out the saga: how Edwards had an affair with Rielle Hunter, a woman he met in a New York bar; how Hunter had become pregnant; and how Edwards insiders concocted a plan to have a campaign aide, Andrew Young, claim paternity while campaign donors paid for Young and Hunter to go into hiding.
"We got a little lucky; we're also a little bit good," Steve Plaumann, senior executive editor of The National Enquirer, said when I appeared with him and ABC's Brian Ross on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" a while back.
The Enquirer had a good inside source or sources. We don't know who because they were anonymous - something that The News & Observer discourages and rarely uses in staff stories.
In his tell-all book, "The Politician," Young points his finger at Hunter or her friend Mimi Hockman as the likely source of the Enquirer stories.
Edwards might even have suspected his girlfriend. At one point, if Young's account is to be believed, Edwards asks him how The National Enquirer tracked Hunter from New Jersey to her hideaway in the Governor's Club in Chapel Hill.
"Just between us," Edwards is quoted as saying in the book, "I suspect she's [Hunter's] talking to them. Do you think so?"
"Hell yes," Young says he replied. "All she does is talk on her damn phone about you."
Whoever was talking, the Enquirer was paying - a practice that most news organizations don't engage in.
"They pay people to talk to them," said Ross, ABC's chief investigative correspondent. "We're not in a position to do that. Again and again in trying to pursue this story we would be asked by people who were central to it, 'What's in it for me? They [The Enquirer] offered me $50,000. What do you have?' We have a cup of coffee. So we're at a disadvantage there."
'Wiring' the story
As we say in the news business, The National Enquirer had the story wired. When Edwards showed up at the Beverly Hills Hilton to visit Hunter and their newborn baby, Quinn, The National Enquirer was waiting for him at the hotel, obviously tipped off by someone with inside knowledge.
The Enquirer was also willing to spend big money in pursuit of the story. It had a lengthy paparazzi-style stakeout in Chapel Hill to get a photograph of the pregnant Hunter. They waited days for her to leave her gated community to visit a doctor's office.
The initial National Enquirer story was easy to dismiss. It quoted an anonymous source saying Edwards had had an affair with an unidentified woman. The National Enquirer has a history of publishing questionable stories about the personal lives of leading political figures, including President George W. Bush and then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin - most of which are never followed up by other news organizations.
But this time, it became evident that the Enquirer was on to something, especially when it ran photographs of the pregnant Hunter.
The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer pursued the story from the beginning, sending reporters to New Jersey and California to follow leads. But the story was a dead end because no one was talking, and Edwards and his staff were denying everything.
It was only long after Edwards' presidential campaign was over and his political career dead that some Edwards aides began to talk about what they knew about the Edwards affair in the best-selling book "Game Change." And even then, they are mostly quoted anonymously. Young went public only after the money dried up from the Edwards financial patrons who were buying his silence. Then, he saw a way to cash in with his story.
Most news organizations would have loved to break such a juicy political sex scandal. But this was a hard story for news organizations of all ideological stripes. Not only did The New York Times not break the story, neither did Fox News nor the conservative blogs.
Sex stories and politics always involve difficult choices.
Sexual innuendo has become a common weapon in political campaigns; candidates for major offices can now expect to be slimed. The initial Republican line of attack on Edwards was not that he was a womanizer but that he was gay. (See "Breck Girl" and conservative columnist Ann Coulter using a derogatory term for gays to describe Edwards.)
At what point do you pay attention to the whispering campaigns? At what juncture does a news organization put its full resources into investigating the sex life of a politician? That is a far easier call for The National Enquirer, whose meat and potatoes are sex scandals.
There is also this question: When is a candidate's sex life the public's business? There are no clear rules here. But clearly the Edwards scandal met that threshold because it told us something about Edwards' reckless nature and lack of judgment.
And it was the National Enquirer that got the story.
