Rielle Hunter Bares Love For 'Johnny' Edwards

At last! Rielle Hunter, mistress and love-child mama to twice-failed Democratic White House wannabe John Edwards, bares her soul--her trim midriff and silky thighs--to GQ.

The woman whose calling card to an Edwards campaign aide proclaimed "Rielle Hunter. Being is Free," says she's never been a "gold-digger" or a "stalker" in the relationship where Edwards "held all the power," and though she slept with him in a New York hotel room the night they met, she denied they had sex in the bed he shared with his wife Elizabeth in North Carolina. Hunter, 45, calls the couple's 33-year marriage "toxic," but says she does feel bad the affair progressed while Mrs. Edwards battled incurable cancer.

"My God, I have such compassion for her," says Hunter, whose hiring as the campaign videographer put her in close contact with "Johnny" for months until she pushed out. "But it's also sad to me, [Elizabeth's] unwillingness to take responsibility for her part in the marriage. And her unwillingness to face the truth."

Hunter calls her love for Johnny "unconditional," but in one exchange with writer Lisa DePaulo, she's not so sure about reciprocity. "I can't speak for him. I wouldn't ever speak for him." She also says, "I know he loves me. I have never had any doubt about that at all. We love each other very much...I believe that will be till death do us part. The love doesn't go away."

Candor is a commodity in very short supply in this political spectacle, which included a scheme for Andrew Young, Edwards' trusted aide, to claim he had fathered Quinn. Her great regret in all of this was not rejecting this particular house of cards, which Young claims was Edwards' idea in his recent memoir, "The Politician." Hunter talks of her hurt when Edwards initially and vehemently denied paternity, and then renewed his wedding vows with his wife. Contrary to reports that he discussed marrying her on a Manhattan rooftop as the Dave Mathews Band performed, she contends "we have not spoken about any wedding plans."

On advice of her counsel, not much was said about the sex video Hunter shot with Johnny while pregnant, and which she left behind with Young and his wife Cheri, with whom she moved around the country to hide from the press before and after Quinn's birth. Hunter is suing the Youngs for invasion of privacy, alleging they stole the video and other racy materials belonging to her. But the couple contends she never asked for the tape and other materials she kept in a box in their home, and that the Youngs retained it as proof of the affair with Edwards. Depositions are being taken in this case, and, as was bound to happen, damaging -- not to mention icky -- video details have begun to leak out.

"Both participants are naked. Hunter is propped up against the hotel bed headboard, with John Edwards belly-down on the bed between her legs," writes Diane Dimond in the Daily Beast, citing several sources she said had viewed the video. "As Hunter, the campaign's official videographer, holds the camera, a smiling Edwards performs oral sex. Because of the camera angle, Hunter's face is not visible, but her distinctive jewelry is. Not only does candidate Edwards know he's being filmed, one source says, he's also clowning around and 'graphically performing for the camera.'"

"It's not just the raw nature of the video,'' writes Dimond, "but its context--a married presidential candidate with a cancer-stricken wife, roughly a dozen weeks before his make-or-break moment, the Iowa caucuses--that makes it so damning. A leading candidate to be commander in chief putting himself in an easy position to be extorted."

And beyond the GQ interview and details of the video, Edwards has to be worried about the federal grand jury looking into possible violations of campaign finance if funds were diverted from political donors for Hunter's living expenses."

The affair ignited in February 2006, Hunter says, after she stared openly at Edwards -- whom she did not recognize -- in a Manhattan hotel bar. She made no move then because she believes that "if a man is attracted to you, he needs to take the first step." Seeing him a bit later on the street, she blurted out, "You're so hot." She was struck by the fact "he is not the two-dimensional geek that I thought he was." Sure, she went to his hotel room that night, but "there was no sexual intention here at all." Soon however, there developed ''sooo much attraction and sooo much...I want to say love, but it wasn't love at that point. You know, it was just this, this magnetic force field like I had never experienced...He was pretty relentless. And that's all I'm going to say on that!"

But if he were relentless, and by extension and experience, manipulative in the extreme, Hunter apparently wouldn't have it any other way. When asked if there's anything she'd change about her beloved "Johnny," she takes the rap. "I get frustrated. And when I get frustrated--all under the story line that he's not doing what I want him to do, or he's not acting the way I want him to act--I lose patience. So I would wish for more patience."

Hunter, who is given to New Age bromides, notes that "Everyone talks about how Johnny has fallen from grace. In reality, he's fallen to grace. He is integrated. He has grown in awareness and humility."

In what may be a telling coda to this political soap opera,Hunter gave a vague, almost wistful answer when asked, since Johnny is now separated and apparently has a "decent" relationship with mother and child, "Why not just be with him at this point?"

Answers Hunter: "Oh, you're wanting the fairy-tale ending!"