The Washington Post has a profile piece on John Edwards as he awaits for trial. It’s an interesting article which depicts well the consequences of John Edwards’ actions.
Sometimes Bergenfield [a long-time friend] just listened. Edwards always talked about his children and often of his late wife, Elizabeth, and, after a while, he usually got around to the matter of Rielle Hunter, the woman with whom he had an affair and a child. These were the characters of the soap opera that Edwards’s life had descended to — the Would-Be President, the Other Woman, the Love Child, the Courageous Wife, the Dying Wife — but here in this large, lonesome house, the conversations were intimate and introspective. Edwards sounded utterly befuddled by what he had done, as if he were talking about a stranger.
The article is not making excuses for the man and neither am I. It just paints a stark picture of a man who once had it all.
The unrelenting quiet is an indication of just how far he has fallen. Especially around Chapel Hill and the Edwardses’ former home in nearby Raleigh, several longtime friends privately say that they want nothing to do with him; that they felt personally betrayed by his persistent lies during the period when he desperately sought to cover up his affair.
The antipathy toward him around these parts shows no signs of abating. He spends considerably less time in popular Chapel Hill haunts that once — in his days as a stunningly successful trial lawyer and overnight political star — accorded him golden-boy status.