RIELLE HUNTER and JOHN EDWARDS : MISTRESS OF THE MONTH

The trial of John Edwards for possible use of money given to him by two grand supporters, Bunny Mellon (the multimillionaire who also designed the rose garden for the White House in the President John F. Kennedy era) and Fred Baron, in an illegal way, was very interesting to me. He was accused of using the money to hide his mistress Rielle Hunter. Some say that hiding her was in fact a campaign strategy.

I believe it that Edwards' covered up his involvement with Rielle to protect his wife of many years, Elizabeth, who had breast cancer and soon died of it. He may have fallen in love and /or lust with another woman, a very different woman than his wife, but that doesn't mean he was totally insensitive to that fact that the mother of his older children was dying of a terrible disease or that they had a long history together.

Rielle was strategically moved around and given/paid about $9000 a month to live on. She gave birth to a child as a result of the affair, a daughter, who is about four.

The article from ABC news that I'm linking to paints Reille as woman who is quirky. Some other articles I've read about her would make her out to be a woman with a shady and sad past, as if she is the bad woman who brought the man down. Isn't that typical stereotyping of the mistress, as if it doesn't take two to tango?

An excerpt that focuses on her reinvention of herself, like so many people who are coming out of nowhere and striving to achieve: "Hunter was born in 1964 and named Lisa Jo Druck. She married Alexander Hunter in 1991 and took his last name, becoming Lisa Jo Hunter. In 1994, she legally changed her first name to Rielle.

But it doesn't stop there. On her daughter's birth certificate (which does not include the girl's father's name) Hunter used the alias Rielle Jaya James Druck.

While Hunter was receiving hush money from Edwards' donors, aide Andrew Young testified, she received an American Express credit card in the fake name Jaya James. She picked the name, she said, because it sounded like Jesse James, the famed Western outlaw. When the card arrived, it read "Randy Jaya James" and Hunter refused to use it. It was later reprinted "R. Jaya James."

I'm linking to an ABC news article about Rielle which attempts to explain that she may not have been called to testify because she's kooky, into astrology (so many people are! Why wasn't Nancy Reagan on trial for that?) and so on.