Last month’s National Enquirer story on John Edwards and his alleged affair with campaign staffer Rielle Hunter may or may not be total bullshit. One insider said “there’s a lot of smoke… no smoking gun,” while another said the tab has plans to publish e-mails containing damning details of the reported affair.

Enquirer editor David Perel wouldn’t comment on the recent speculation, telling Rush & Malloy “I never like to talk about what’s not published, but we are still doing the story. The original story was 100% accurate.” Meanwhile, Edwards says “the story disappeared because it’s made up.”

Um, yeah…

The way I remember it, I first met Rielle Hunter in a nightclub called Nells in early 1987, although the circumstances of our first meeting seem to be in dispute. In my defense I can only say that events of that decade are not always as clearly etched in memory as we might wish, and neither of us was living a very sober or reflective life back then. At that time Rielle’s name was Lisa Druck, and when she wasn’t out at nightclubs she was taking acting classes. We dated for only a few months, but in that period I spent a lot of time with Lisa and her friends, whose behavior intrigued and appalled me to such an extent that I ended up basing a novel on the experience. The novel was called Story of My Life, and it was narrated in the first person from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine- addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa. I certainly thought of Alison Poole as a sympathetic and ultimately endearing character. One of her most striking traits was her obsession with truth-telling and her horror of being lied to, something that I certainly took directly from Lisa. When Lisa moved to Calfornia and got married I lost track of her, though I was reminded of her whenever someone would ask me, at book signings and lectures, what I imagined happened to Alison Poole after the book ended — whether I saw her as turning her life around or not. Through the grapevine I picked up occasional reports from the West Coast. I heard that Lisa had changed her name to Rielle, that she’d gotten divorced, and that she was increasingly engaged in various spiritual quests which she attempted to explain to me when I finally ran into her; all I could tell for certain was that she was a far happier person than I remembered. Recently she returned to Manhattan and one sunny afternoon in Washington Square Park, attempted to enlighten me on the subject of her own enlightenment.

Labels: John Edwards, Rielle Hunter