John Edwards’ daughter Cate is finally speaking out about her father’s affair with a former campaign aide, which effectively ended his marriage to her late mother, Elizabeth, and killed his political career.
“I was devastated, and I was disappointed,” Cate Edwards tells NBC’s Savannah Guthrie in an interview set to air Friday on the “Today” show and “Rock Center with Brian Williams.” “I mean, these are my parents. I had grown up with a lot of love in my family.”
According to interview excerpts released by the network, Edwards tells NBC her father told her about the affair directly. Asked if she was mad, she tells Guthrie, “Yeah, yeah of course.”
In spite of her anger over her father's affair, Cate Edwards, who is a lawyer, stood by John Edwards' side when he went on trial last year for alleged campaign finance violations related to his efforts to hide his affair from his wife and the public. The proceedings ended in a mistrial.
Edwards tells NBC that she met Rielle Hunter, the campaign videographer who later gave birth to John Edwards’ baby, during her father’s 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, but implies that she hasn’t since. (Cate and her siblings, Jack and Emma Claire, have reportedly met their half-sister, Frances Quinn Hunter.) Asked about Hunter’s book trashing Elizabeth Edwards, who died in 2010, Cate calls the book “a poor choice.”
“I guess that’s all I can say,” she says.
Asked about the death of her mother, Edwards says she is still grieving and misses her mother every day, in part because of small things.
“I get away with bad grammar. I never used to get away with bad grammar,” she tells NBC. “You know, I find a great deal online. We were super competitive about finding the best deal online.”
The consensus of comments from the reader's peanut gallery (read: comments section) on the news site where this story appeared seems to shape up like this:
Rielle Hunter is, pretty much, trashy.
Cate Edwards is, pretty much, classy.
Hmmm.
I don't see any reference in the news story that indicates that Cate is doing this (or any other) interview so as to promote anything she might be offering up shortly in the way of published memoir for sale, so I suppose that, comparing the two presentations, she "outclasses" the mistress Hunter.
For my money, though, the really...really...classy thing to do here....
Would be for Cate Edwards to keep all this quiet and private, while putting it in the two places where it really belongs.
Behind her.
And beneath her.
Like I said, I'm obviously missing something.
