As Palmieri predicted, the Nightline interview did nothing to rehabilitate Edwards—and the months thereafter only brought him more misery. Isolated, scorned, turned into a national punch line, Edwards slipped into a dark place. His weight plummeted. His countenance turned sickly. Some of his former aides began to fear that he might kill himself. And though the extent of his ruin didn’t reach that depth, the nightmarishness of his circumstances remain hard to overstate. A North Carolina grand jury is expected soon to reach a conclusion in its investigation of whether Edwards or his associates illegally used campaign cash to cover up his affair. Hunter is suing him for child support. And next month Andrew Young will publish a tell-all book that promises to give new definition to the term sordid.
As for Elizabeth Edwards, she is reportedly now urging John to accede to Hunter’s demands and take responsibility for his paternity of Frances Quinn—a dramatic and no doubt painful turnabout from her position eighteen months ago. Confronted then with the Enquirer photo of her husband cuddling Hunter’s baby, she insisted to Palmieri that she still believed he was not the father. “I have to believe it,” Elizabeth said. “Because if I don’t, it means I’m married to a monster.”
The story of how we got here, though, is even worse.
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