Edwards' mistress' bizarre past: born "Lisa Druck", subject of a Jay McInerney novel...

[npincus]

OK, if you are sick of threads on this subject, turn back and/or HIDE away.

Rielle Hunter is certainly a strange duck in my opinion; she has certainly led a colorful life. The contrast in personality/character between (my opinion again) this flaky, New Age lingo-spouting, rather intellecutally shallow person and the dignified Mrs. Edwards couldn't be greater.




http://www.newsobserver.com/politics/story/1170494.html

As Lisa Druck, she was a Florida girl from the time she was born in Fort Lauderdale until she left in 1984, after spending less than two years enrolled at the University of Tampa. By 1987, she had ended up in the hard-partying New York circle of novelist Jay McInerney.

McInerney, whose books portrayed the cocaine-fueled atmosphere of New York City in the 1980s, based his third novel, "Story of My Life," on his time with Druck and their friends. One character, Alison Poole, was specifically modeled after her, McInerney said in a 2005 magazine article. He said that she had "intrigued and appalled" him.

The story, in Breathe Magazine, was primarily a transcript of a discussion between Hunter and McInerney following their reunion in Manhattan that year.

"For me you're a little bit frozen in time, a little bit Alison Poole, the 21-year-old party girl in that book who runs around New York going to nightclubs, doing drugs, and abusing credit cards," McInerney said.

She replies that she did a lot of drugs, but adds that she was struck by her character's "need for truth."

"That's definitely a theme in my life -- seeker of truth," she tells him.

Hunter tells him that she left New York to move to Los Angeles to become an actress and to get away from the drug scene in New York. She said she got off drugs in California with the help of a healer.

<snip>

She tried her hand at writing, churning out scripts for potential TV, film or stage projects with such titles as "Jupiter, Where Are You?", "So Very Virgo," "Reality Reels," "It's All About Uranus," "S- Happens: The Never Ending Search for the Perfect Diaper" and "Needy Nellie." None of the titles, which are listed in the property settlement order in the Hunters' 1999 divorce case, are in the authoritative Internet Movie Data Base.

[DainBramaged]

1. Well, she got her 15 minutes at the cost of the reputation of John Edwards

Does leech sound like a good description of her character?

[Colobo]

3. Sounds like you're blaming her for Edwards's lack of judgement...

He's to blame- he chose to sleep with her while married and about to run for president.

[DainBramaged]

20. It takes two to fuck! Keep that in mind.

[JI7]

45. nope, it was only Edwards who married his wife

[DainBramaged]

48. Of course, it is ALL JE's fault, what is wrong with me to think otherwise?

The other woman wasn't opportunistic at all.

:eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes:

[BeyondGeography]

5. What a dain bramaged thing to say

[Stuckinthebush]

7. Edwards did this to himself

Don't blame her for his actions. I'm sure she opened the door to a possible relationship but John walked right in. He fucked his own career up.

[DainBramaged]

21. Right, I look at it as she was the opportunist, not him

blinders, the cause of most accidents.

On edit

So it was ok with you that Cindy McCain participated in her relationship at the cost of McCain's first wife, and that only McCain was to blame for the relationship, not her???

[Stuckinthebush]

27. No, she has blame

I'm not saying that the woman is not to blame. It takes two people to engage in an affair. Both people have to suspend their morals (if they had them) to do this. On discussing this with my ex-wife regarding her continued affair with a married man, she said, "We are all adults and I don't make his decisions for him." I told her that this was morally ambiguous and that, indeed, she has a choice to engage in the affair or not. That decision affects people she doesn't know like his wife and children.

Now, in Edwards' situation I have great disdain for both of the adults involved because they made morally ambiguous choices. I would never accuse her, however, of ruining his career because that lets him off the hook. He made the choice to engage her in these acts so he is as much to blame. The original post seemed to place the blame squarely on her.

As for Cindy McCain, she was in the same boat. I may give her a little more slack because she was little more than a kid when McCain - a forty year old man - came after her. However, she did make the choice.

[JI7]

8. John Edwards hurt his own reputation, you did the same with Eliot Spitzer

making out the men to be some kind of victims.

these guys weren't forced to do what they did.

[DainBramaged]

22. Neither were the women, keep that in mind, remember, an affair is between

TWO people, not one person and his hand.


And for those of you on my ignore list, sorry, no replies.

[lukasahero]

43. Two people yes, but only one of them was married

HE broke his vows to Elizabeth.

[JI7]

44. those women were not the ones who married and made a commitment

to Elizabeth and Silda and anyone else.

[DainBramaged]

49. Hmmm, ya think she had NO idea who John Edwards was

and she lived in a bubble?

I don't know what your problem is with me, Edwards was wrong, but to assume his mistress is blameless is just fucked up.

Goodbye.

[City Lights]

9. Edwards soiled his own reputation.

If she's a leech, so is he.

:thumbsdown:

[Dreamer Tatum]

19. Good thing we found out about Edwards' character now

If he can't fend off a leech, that is.

[DainBramaged]

23. You are ABSOLUTELY correct, this is a bad character flaw

and especially with Elizabeth being terminally ill. Her forgiving of him is an incredible act in and of itself.


Those who can be tempted can be blackmailed.

[Enrique]

2. "It's all about Uranus" sounds like a porn flick

maybe it's just me...

[bdf]

25. It's not just you

I was about to post something very similar until I saw that you'd beaten me to it.

Time for the old, not-very-funny, astronomy joke. A teacher is asked by a student "What colour is Uranus?" The teacher quickly replies "The same colour as Mars."

Uninteresting side-note: famous (in the UK) astronomer Patrick Moore always pronounces it "you're a nus" rather than the common "you're anus" to avoid this problem.

And that brings me to a pet peeve of mine. Back when anusol (pile ointment) was an ask-the-pharmacist item, I'd ask for "anus ol." Most pharmacists would correct my pronunciation and insist it was "annus ol." But it's not for applying to a year, it's for applying to my anus. So I'd usually tell them I wanted to put it on my arse so I didn't understand why it hadn't been called arse-ol. Which usually resulted in me being ejected from the pharmacy without any pile ointment.

TMI time...

These days I eat food heavily spiced with chillis to deal with my piles. The capsaicin in the chillis irritates the bowel to secrete mucous, resulting in a much looser (and therefore more easily-evacuated) stool. Sometimes so loose that I can do a fair imitation of a space shuttle launch on the toilet.

[verges]

28. Too much information.

[bdf]

32. I DID warn people

And figured it might actually help somebody.

Now if you really wish to complain about TMI, read on...

Back before I discovered the chilli cure, I'd be straining on the pot for around 30 minutes. At the end of it there was what appeared to be a large squirt of tomato ketchup on top of the turd. And it was fucking painful the whole time I was straining. With the chilli diet it's over in a couple of minutes, no strain, no pain, and no ketchup.

What is TMI to you may bring blessed relief to somebody else.

[PCIntern]

40. I'm going to vomit, fast a a comet...

in keeping with our ass-tronomy theme.

[bdf]

42. TMI! :D (n/t)

[JVS]

37. DUzy

[PfcHammer]

46. lol

"These days I eat food heavily spiced with chillis to deal with my piles. The capsaicin in the chillis irritates the bowel to secrete mucous, resulting in a much looser (and therefore more easily-evacuated) stool. Sometimes so loose that I can do a fair imitation of a space shuttle launch on the toilet."

"Back before I discovered the chilli cure, I'd be straining on the pot for around 30 minutes. At the end of it there was what appeared to be a large squirt of tomato ketchup on top of the turd. And it was fucking painful the whole time I was straining. With the chilli diet it's over in a couple of minutes, no strain, no pain, and no ketchup."


Dude, these gems are teh awesome. If you wanna start a separate roid thread, I'll K+R the shit out of it.:thumbsup: :rofl:

[Withywindle]

51. Well, "urine-us" isn't that much better, is it? n/t

[JI7]

4. i wonder how much playboy, penthouse etc will offer her

[Berry Cool]

6. Just to make things even more bizarre

it should be noted that another of McInerney's fellow Brat Pack novelists, Bret Easton Ellis, picked up the Alison Poole character and inserted her into his novels American Psycho and Glamorama. (Patrick Bateman, the sick killer in the former, rapes her but decides for some reason not to kill her.)

Article about it here: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/08/allow_bret_easton_ellis_to_int.html

[npincus]

16. very interesting...

she's a real piece of work.

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[polichick]

12. Someone covered this the other night (Anderson Cooper maybe) - interesting.

[Divernan]

13. Rielle threatens: "someday the truth about her (Elizabeth) will come out."

Also, she and McInerny pitch a tv series about "women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them." I personally think that Edwards is controlling this whacky lady by promising to marry her, "eventually", i.e., when Elizabeth dies. Clearly, he is continuing contact with her.

www.newsweek.com/id/151783

Some excerpts from the Newsweek article:
"By this point, we were each well into our second glass of wine. "So tell me," I asked, "what do you think of Elizabeth Edwards?" "I've only met her once," Rielle said. "She does not give off good energy. She didn't make eye contact with me." In NEWSWEEK, I wrote a short story about how Edwards had brought this rather unorthodox woman, whom he'd met in a bar, into his campaign to make videos that showed off his unseen side—a less slick, packaged Edwards. We ran it in the PERISCOPE section under the headline EDWARDS UNTUCKED. I didn't mention Rielle's belief in Edwards's potential to be Gandhi or her distaste for Elizabeth. I wanted to keep her as a source.

When I next saw Rielle weeks later, she told me that she'd been fired by the Edwards campaign. She seemed perfectly cheerful about it, but she proceeded to tell me a tale of woe—how the campaign hadn't understood her, how they'd ruined the Webisodes, how they'd impeded her vision and how Edwards himself had failed to defend her. The chief villain in this saga was Elizabeth Edwards. "Someday," Rielle said, "the truth about her is going to come out."

By then, I had decided that Rielle was a less than reliable source. I continued to see her, but more out of curiosity than a belief that I was going to learn much about Edwards from her. I liked Rielle. I let her do my astrological chart. I began to feel a little like the nun in that old joke who complains about receiving a three-hour obscene phone call …Why didn't I just hang up?

But I didn't. I stayed in touch with Rielle for months. At lunch at the Soho House in late spring of '07, Rielle told me that she and novelist Jay McInerney were working on a "genius" idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them. She said they wanted to pitch this idea to Darren Star, creator of "Melrose Place" and "Sex and the City." At lunch early that summer, I asked Rielle if she was dating anyone. She answered simply, "I'm in love." I asked, "Who with?" "I can't tell you," she said, "but maybe someday we'll all be friends."

[noel711]

26. Yeah, I'll bet she din't like Elizabeth...

Elizabeth is nobody's fool... she saw the truth of this woman
from the 'get-go'... no wonder she saw Elizabeth as a villain....

Elizabeth is probably the force behind getting those so-called
campaign videos off the website.

This woman was nothing but an opportunist.

[verges]

29. To me

she sounds more like an irresponsible, immature flake.

[Blue_Tires]

30. ugh...this is getting more tawdry by the hour

[npincus]

38. meeeee-ow.

[Crunchy Frog]

14. It pays to be somewhat selective over where one dips one's wick.

Especially when one is running for president.

[renie408]

15. I was wondering if maybe he did this BECAUSE Elizabeth was so sick??

People do some strange shit when they freak out. I actually don't doubt that Elizabeth Edwards is the love of John Edwards life. Maybe he had some kind of freak out from the pressure cooker of campaigning and her diagnosis?? This woman is the complete opposite of his Elizabeth. She is blonde, thin, doesn't sound terribly responsible or all that bright...maybe this affair was a way for him to 'take a break' from his life?

This isn't in the nature of an excuse. I am just trying to understand what made him do this extremely stupid thing with this particular person.

[Berry Cool]

17. Maybe Rielle herself has given us a clue, and right in the Newsweek article too.

"The real John Edwards, she believed, was a brilliant, generous, giving man who was driven by competing impulses—to feed his ego and serve the world."

Maybe that's it, in a nutshell. He has noble impulses, but he also has very powerful impulses to be adored and idolized. Elizabeth certainly served those, because she believed so strongly in his noble impulses, but perhaps that got old after a while--or perhaps he became terrified of losing her form of ego-feed when she became ill. (Anyone ever noticed how men are so much quicker to remarry when they lose their wives than most women are when their husbands die? I suspect it's because most women find the death of a spouse oddly freeing--because being widowed for them means being unburdened by the work of supporting a man's life--while most men are so devastated by the loss of the woman who organized their lives for them that they jump almost immediately into a relationship with another woman to "replace" her on the job.)

Maybe John needed another woman to worship and adore him--a spare in case he lost the first, so to speak. Rielle certainly would have filled the bill, with all that New Age blather about how he was a wonderful soul who hadn't yet fulfilled his potential. He was in a mood to be flattered by bullshit, and she was full of it.

If I'd been the one invited to have dinner with her, like the author of that article, the first thing I would have said to her after she fed me that line about how wonderful he was and how she wanted to help him fulfill his potential would have been: "You want to get into his pants, don't you?"

Because really, let's get down to brass tacks. Her shtick isn't really about spirituality and potential. It's about a woman being attracted to the looks and power of a man, and wanting to screw him. The rest is just window dressing.

[renie408]

18. I hadn't thought of it that way, but I can see that.

I was thinking more along the lines of a subconcious denial of his reality. God knows, Rielle Hunter would be a complete break from his 'real' life.

[MonteLukast]

50. The type of woman you have an affair with...

From my observation, an affair hurts the worst when the other woman is an "upgrade" on the wife--somebody younger, hotter, more fun, more pliable, more fertile.

If someone is an opposite, it doesn't seem to hurt as much. It more easily falls under the category of diversion or sexual variety, which implies far less of a betrayal than the former scenario.

[cherokeeprogressive]

24. It's all about Uranus LOL LOL

I wonder if the sequels to that script would be "The Rings Around Uranus" or "I've Seen Uranus with My Own Eyes".

[PurityOfEssence]

34. Suggestion for her autobiography: "Twat Were You Thinking?"

Perhaps he thought that someone so flagrantly promiscuous would be a "safe" lay and that she could compartmentalize enough that it wouldn't be taking advantage of her emotionally.

Perhaps someone with such a sexual history was just too exciting for a guy who may have only had a couple of partners in his life.

Whatever. She's certainly a piece of work and the whole thing just nauseates me. This new-age psychobabble crap fits just perfectly with a ludicrous crock of shit like astrology, and the sheer depth of her shallowness echoes from what I'm reading and the clip from "Extra". Of course she wanted to be an actress. There are good reasons for wanting that, but I'll bet those weren't hers.

She brought him down, so I hope she's proud. (Yes, it's his fault too, and hubris as well as egocentricity, but it looks like he didn't know what kind of poison he was toying with with her, and bad judgment is not a great trait for a politician.)

She's a sad hanger-on and the ruin of a trendy self-indulgent vapoid at the ebb of her youth. Truly, she belongs in show business, but there's too much competition for her schtick, and it doesn't really sound like she has the chops to swim with the REAL Barracudas.

More will come out, and it won't be pretty. John will take more hits, many deservedly, and so will Elizabeth, not so deservedly. Members of his staff will have troubles. Her family should be used to enduring the fallout from her follies by now, but they'll probably have to endure some crap they don't quite deserve, too. Then there's the little girl. There's also Andrew Young and his family.

What really has me curious here is what the other campaigns did and knew, and I hope that information stays under wraps. This feels much much bigger than it seems at the moment.

[MonteLukast]

31. Any grown woman who thinks that...

... a man who's been married lovingly for 30 years is just going to dump his wife, his kids, and their entire history for her-- baby or no baby involved-- is out of her freakin' mind.

Bridget Moynahan thought the same thing: "If I have Tom Brady's baby, he'll stay with me forever and ever!!!"

I will never understand why some women still believe this in 21st-century America. Not unless there's a calculated plot involved to get child support from him (which it could still be).

[deaniac21]

33. I'm guessing she is really good in bed.

[bevoette]

35. gotDAMN but men let their penises lead them to some EFFED up places!

:eyes:

[Berry Cool]

39. Indeed they do.

There's a reason for the saying "Don't let the little head do the thinking for the big one." Sadly, all too many men are unable to follow the advice. They are essentially being led around on a dog leash by a single part of their bodies that is dictating the course of life for the whole rest.

[JVS]

36. getting more and more tawdry

[Cleita]

41. My two-cents.

She doesn't hold a candle to Elizabeth, but I have found out in life, that the other woman seldom does. Sure there are exceptions like Elizabeth Taylor or Angelina Jolie, but usually the only thing the other woman has to offer is that she's probably much younger than the cheated upon wife. Why men go there has always been a mystery to me.

[mnhtnbb]

47. Edwards answered that. It's narcissism.