Edwards story had met doubts

Ex-staffer dismissed it, helped Hunter, Young

The former campaign finance chairman for John Edwards said Wednesday that he thought tabloid reports that Edwards had an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter were untrue when he paid to relocate her and another campaign worker and his family to California last year.

Dallas lawyer Fred Baron said in e-mail to The News & Observer, "I will restate what I have previously stated on one point: I learned of the affair only a few weeks ago and had previously presumed that the 'tabloid' stuff was all bogus."

The statement from Baron follows several days of questions raised by a former associate of Hunter's and her sister, who challenged Edwards' timeline of the relationship.

In an interview Friday with ABC's "Nightline" program, Edwards admitted to having had an affair with Hunter but denied being the father of her daughter, born Feb. 27 in Santa Barbara, Calif. Former campaign aide Andrew Young, who with Baron's assistance moved to the Santa Barbara area last year with his wife and three children, released a statement online last year saying he was the father of Hunter's then-unborn child.

In his ABC interview, Edwards said the affair did not start until after Edwards' political action committee hired Hunter to film four videos posted online. The first check cut to Hunter's film company, Midline Groove Productions, was written July 5, 2006, for $12,500, according to campaign finance reports.

However, a publicist based near Austin, Texas, who said she was a close friend of Hunter's until they lost contact in June 2006, has said the relationship had started months before then. Pigeon O'Brien told ABC News and other media outlets that the affair began almost half a year before Edwards' PAC cut the first check to Hunter's company for the videos. They later were pulled from the Internet. On Wednesday, O'Brien said in a phone interview that Edwards' extramarital affair with Hunter began as early as February 2006 and was still going on in June, when she lost contact with Hunter.

According to business records, Midline Groove Productions was not incorporated in Delaware until June 30, 2006.

In an interview Tuesday with Entertainment Tonight, Hunter's sister Roxanne Druck Marshall asked whether Edwards had been truthful in his interview.

"The most shocking thing was seeing him on TV give these half-truths, these half-baked answers," Druck Marshall said in the interview posted on the entertainment new program's Web site. "I wish for the well-being of everybody involved -- you know, both families -- I wish he would have just come clean."

Hunter has not made herself available for interviews, and Edwards has not commented publicly since the interview Friday, which was aired to coincide with the widely watched broadcast of the Olympic Games' opening ceremonies on rival network NBC.

Helping Hunter, Young

Baron, a key national fundraiser for Democratic Party causes, first released a statement Friday declaring that he had decided independently, without notifying Edwards, to help Hunter and Young "rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to conduct a normal life," by paying for their move from Chapel Hill to California.

Baron declined to comment further Wednesday, but in an interview posted online by Texas Lawyer magazine, said he paid for several months of rent for Hunter and the Youngs without informing Edwards. Baron denied media reports that he was paying as much as $15,000 a month.

"I never discussed it with John. He was on the campaign trail in Iowa at the time," Baron said in the Texas Lawyer article.