A classless Rielle Hunter blasts Elizabeth Edwards in her new tell-all book, calling her deceased love rival a “witch on wheels” who drove former Sen. John Edwards to cheat.
In “What Really Happened,” Hunter calls her lover’s popular cancer-stricken wife “crazy” and “venomous.”
Hunter depicts Edwards “barking” demands at her husband, physically attacking him and callously firing his staffers all while cultivating her public persona as a “saint,” according to ABC News.
After Edwards learned on New Year’s Eve 2006 about her husband’s affair with Hunter, she spent two days stalking the mistress, repeatedly calling and hanging up “at all hours of the day and night from various numbers,” Hunter recalls.
She declares that Edwards’ wife of 31 years “was bonkers because she had been in denial” about his womanizing.
Elizabeth Edwards died of cancer in December 2010, a few months after leaving her husband when he admitted he had fathered Hunter’s child.
Hunter diagnoses John Edwards, too, with mental issues. How else to explain why he publicly denied paternity of their daughter, Frances Quinn, in August 2008?
“He was temporarily insane,” she writes.
“Think about it: Sane, healthy people do not deny their children, especially on national TV, simply because they are afraid of their abusive spouse’s reaction. Only a mentally off person would do that.”
Hunter’s book is set to hit stores next Tuesday, and her publicity blitz begins Friday with an interview on ABC News’ “20/20.” She will appear on more ABC shows next week, including “The View” and “Nightline.”
The blogosphere exploded in outrage over the appearance of Hunter tap-dancing on Elizabeth Edwards’ grave.
“Stay classy, Rielle,” one tweet said.
“Hunter has no class. Elizabeth was terrific,” added another.
“Move over, Satan,” tweeted Brad Logan.
In a preview of the book published on ABC’s website,
Hunter says she wrote the tome detailing her tawdry but high-profile affair because she wants her 4-year-old daughter with Edwards to “have one entirely truthful public account of how she came into the world.”
Hunter, who was born Lisa Druck, picked up the Democrats’ 2004 nominee for vice president at the swanky bar in the Regency Hotel on Park Ave. in February 2006 with a brazen line: “You are so hot.”
Although he was gearing up for a second run at the White House and his wife’s health was delicate, Edwards invited Hunter up to his room.
They began a torrid affair that would continue through his December 2006 presidential announcement in New Orleans; his wife’s March 2007 disclosure that her cancer had returned and it was terminal, and a series of National Enquirer stories starting in October 2007 that exposed his extramarital affair and Hunter’s pregnancy.
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Edwards only quit the presidential race after placing third in the South Carolina and Florida primaries of January 2008.
Even then, according to insider accounts and court testimony, he still harbored delusional fantasies of becoming attorney general or a Supreme Court justice.
His love child was born Feb. 27, 2008.
If Edwards’ reputation as a reckless womanizer who rhapsodized on the stump about how much he cared about the poor while he cheated on his terminally ill wife couldn’t get lower, Hunter’s book might achieve the impossible.
In one of the more bizarre revelations in the book, Hunter writes that when she first met Edwards in New York, he told her he was conducting affairs with three other women — in Chicago, Los Angeles and Florida.
None of it was true.
But Edwards went to extreme lengths to back up his lies, fabricating trips he took to meet with them and showing Hunter a second cell phone he said he used just for his girlfriends.
Edwards told Hunter he lied to her so that she wouldn’t get attached to him, she says.
“Johnny went on to tell me that the three women he had told me about the first night I had met him were, in fact, not real, and that he had made them up,” she writes.
“My mind was racing. . . . He had told me detail upon detail. I remembered the ups and downs of emotion I had felt the night he went to Chicago to break off his relationship there,” she writes.
“My reality in our relationship had been ripped out from under me.”
Ultimately, though, Hunter concluded the lies were part of Edwards’ “character.”
“He has a long history of lying about one thing only — women — and I mistakenly thought I was different,” she writes.
She says Edwards had real affairs with at least two other women before 2004.
In the book, Hunter goes into great detail about her stealthy assignations with Edwards
“The book is a primer on the life of a political mistress — long waits in hotel bars and furtive dinners over takeout, punctuated by short, passionate trysts and the anxiety of being hounded by the paparazzi,” ABC wrote.
Her biggest regret, Hunter writes, is going along with the outlandish scheme to have Edwards aide Andrew Young claim paternity of Frances Quinn to deflect the suspicions of the press and Elizabeth.
“Of all the things that happened in my relationship with Johnny, the thing that I regret the most is going along with this stupid idea and allowing this lie to go public,” Hunter writes.
She is vague in the book about the status of her current relationship with Edwards, but is expected to expound in greater detail on Friday’s “20/20.”
She writes that Edwards is a good father — when he is around.
Edwards last month called his daughter “my precious Quinn, who I love more than any of you can ever imagine.”
“I really have no idea what will happen with us,” Hunter writes. “The jury is still out. But I can honestly say that the ending is of no concern to me anymore. The love is here. And as sappy as it may sound, I love living in love.”
A two-year Justice Department investigation into whether Edwards used $1 million in political donations to hide his affair led to a six-week trial that ended last month in a mistrial.
Last week, prosecutors said they will not attempt to retry Edwards.
Hunter says Edwards was innocent all along and that Young got most of the money supposedly used to buy her silence.
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“I have stood in the kitchen of my little rental house and screamed in frustration more than once: ‘Where is my million dollars? You are going to send Johnny to jail for money that I never even got?’ “
Hunter shopped a book proposal to New York publishers a year ago, but none bit, deeming her an unsympathetic character with limited appeal to book buyers.
Her tell-all is being published by a small Dallas-based firm, BenBella Books.
The company declined to say what she was paid.
Elizabeth Edwards published two books: “Saving Graces,” in 2006, about getting through the death of her teenage son and her first bout with breast cancer, and “Resilience,” in 2009, about her husband’s infidelity, her diagnosis and health care in America.
Both were best sellers.
