John Edwards' mistress speaks out—we really wish she hadn't

In the new issue of GQ magazine, John Edwards' mistress Rielle Hunter spills pretty much everything about her relationship with the former presidential candidate and, in the process, gives a bad name to essentially all womankind and certainly to any woman who's ever had an affair.

To begin, there's the Look at Me, I'm a Sexy Mom photo shoot. In the article's accompanying slideshow, Hunter poses scantily clad for an array of ever-more curious pics-in some, she holds her (and Edwards') 2-year-old daughter Quinn close while wearing an alluring expression and baring her belly, with her pants undone; in others she is entirely pantless, sitting next to a pile of popular stuffed animals, like Kermit and Barney.

What follows is an interview so rife with delusion, epic insensitivity, and just flat-out dumbness it makes us kind of embarrassed to share this lady's gender. The 45-year-old goes into great detail about how she and the senator first met, their many sexual escapades ("Johnny"-as she calls him-was "relentless" in bed), the power of their love, the birth of their child (Edwards wanted Hunter to have an abortion) and the ensuing, career-destroying fallout over their romance. But she entirely eschews personal responsibility for the impact the dalliance had on others and instead avoids accountability by leaning on New Age-y crutches like "energy" and a sense that this union was fated and therefore out of her control. In fact, Hunter believes the relationship changed Johnny for the better, that through all of his public lies and personal deceptions, the married politician became a fully-realized human: "Everyone talks about how Johnny has fallen from grace. In reality, he's fallen to grace. He is integrated. He is living a life of truth," she explains.

While we really can't say for sure whether or not this is accurate, whether Johnny is better person now than before he encountered Rielle Hunter's vagina, lied about it, and got caught, we do know one thing for sure: No wife, and especially not one who has lost a child and is battling terminal cancer, deserves to be blamed (publically or otherwise) for this entire mess. But, in a move common among mistresses (Hailey Glassman's recent trashing of Kate Gosselin comes to mind), Rielle Hunter does just that. She blames Elizabeth Edwards. To wit:

"I believe what happened in his marriage is, he could not go to his wife and say, 'We have an issue.' Because he would be pummeled. So he had a huge fear. Most of his mistakes or errors in judgment were because of his fear of the wrath of Elizabeth. He's allowed himself to be pushed into a lot of things that he wouldn't normally do because of Elizabeth's story line. And the spin that she wants to put out there. He was emasculated. And you know, the wrath of Elizabeth is a mighty wrath."
And:
"[Elizabeth] was in denial about a lot of facts. And I say she was in denial because, you know, their relationship has been dysfunctional and toxic and awful for many, many years. And she was aware of, um, problems and chose to ignore them."
And:
"Infidelity doesn't happen in healthy marriages. The break in the marriage happens before the infidelity. And that break happened, you know, two and a half decades before I got there. So the home was wrecked already. I was not the Home Wrecker."

And this-far beyond the creepy photos, the sexual TMI and complete lack of discretion, the strange, outdated way she talks about Johnny's masculinity and power over her, as if she's a 1950's housewife, and her insistence that he's an honest man-this demonization of Elizabeth Edwards is what ultimately makes Rielle Hunter's behavior unforgiveable. Because, fine, you fell in love with a married man, you had an affair, you got pregnant, you wanted the kid, you still want the guy, somehow all of these things fall under the realm of normal (crappy) human screw-up. But then, to turn around, unrepentant, and publicly humiliate and incriminate your lover's spouse, to disparage a marriage you were never inside of, and to speculate about and invade and judge the emotional sanctity between two people who have spent decades together, that goes beyond being a screw-up, to just being a bad person. It's smug, it's unseemly, it's a girl-on-girl crime and it breaks an essential human code: You wouldn't want it done to you, and so you shouldn't do it to someone else. No matter how "spiritual" Hunter is, nor the boundary-less, free-flowing land where she seems to reside, hurting another person is wrong, and avoiding it when at all possible is a basic rule we should all abide.

As for the couple's future, when asked if she saw the two of them living happily ever after together, Hunter replied, "I have no idea. I do know that I will love him and that love is till death do us part, and probably beyond." To which we say: Good luck with that.
Source: Hello, America, My Name Is Rielle Hunter