Rielle Hunter may have babbled to reporters about the “old soul” of her married paramour John Edwards comparing him with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but she had few kind words for his wife, who she criticized for being aloof. Hunter told Newsweek's Jonathan Darman, "She does not give off good energy. ... I've only met her once.... She didn't make eye contact with me." Hunter was effusive about how she had met a rich and powerful man who was going to make her famous, but she couldn't reveal the identity of her lover and benefactor, Darman wrote. Edwards met Hunter in a New York City hotel bar and later hired her to make a documentary of his campaign. Despite her obvious lack of discretion, it took more than a year for the mainstream media to pick up the story of John Edwards' affair with Hunter, after the presidential candidate admitted to cheating on his wife, but not fathering Hunter's child. Newsweek did publish a story about Hunter and her barroom interview that led to her hiring last year, which promptly got her fired from the campaign. Hunter blamed Elizabeth Edwards for her dismissal. Edwards admitted he had an affair with Hunter while his wife's cancer was in remission. He denies fathering Hunter's daughter, however, and Hunter has said that there she will not submit her daughter to a new" paternity="" test. Hunter was a familiar face to some of the press corp following Edwards' campaign for president in 2006. Sarah Miller writes in The LA Times that she though Hunter was "a wackjob," who wound up at her house for a party. "I had barely poured myself a drink when Rielle came bounding up to me. Her eyes weren't just glowing. They were kind of spinning in her face. I am almost sure that she was not drunk: This was how she always looked, only at this moment, she looked more that way than usual."
