The John Edwards “Love Child” Story

Alex Koppelman at Salon summarized on Friday the latest reports on the John Edwards “love child” story. Koppelman begins:

“The sordid story of an alleged affair between former Sen. John Edwards and Rielle Hunter has popped up again, courtesy of a National Enquirer article saying that the paper's reporters caught Edwards going to meet with Hunter and the couple's purported "love child" at a Los Angeles hotel.

“I know what you're thinking: Why even bother with anything printed by the Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid you probably think of as the kind of "newspaper" that focuses on rumors that Elvis Presley is alive -- and leading a band of rampaging space aliens? That's certainly the message Editor and Publisher's Greg Mitchell sent in an item he published at the Huffington Post on Friday. That's not really the Enquirer's niche, though. It gets confused with publications like the defunct Weekly World News, but in fact the Enquirer is surprisingly good at reporting on these kinds of stories, and it has a decent track record with them. It was the Enquirer that published the photo of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart's lap. It was the Enquirer that broke the story of Rush Limbaugh's addiction to painkillers. And new information about the Edwards story makes the Enquirer's reporting on it look more solid.”

Koppelman continues:

The Enquirer had first alleged that Edwards and Hunter were having an affair last year; it later reported that Hunter was pregnant with Edwards' child, though Andrew Young, a friend of Edwards', has said the baby is his. The latest chapter in the saga happened earlier this week, when reporters from the paper claimed that they spotted Edwards -- and confronted him -- at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night after being told beforehand that the former Democratic vice-presidential nominee would be there to meet with Hunter and the baby.

“These stories have largely been ignored by the mainstream press, but new details that emerged Friday lend some credibility to the Enquirer's account, though they're not proof of it. FoxNews.com has now published a story based on an interview with one of the security guards at the hotel, who gave an account of intervening ‘between a man he identified as former Sen. John Edwards and tabloid reporters who chased down the former presidential hopeful.”’
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