“This Is About Me”: John Edwards Walks Away

Posted by Amy Davidson

May 31, 2012

 In a funny way, the jurors in the John Edwards trial, who on Thursday acquitted him on one count and deadlocked on five others, decided that they had some faith in friendship and affection, if not love. That is not what one might expect the lesson to be in a case full of counterfeit emotions and intimate betrayal. But they found, in their single “not guilty,” that whatever the motives of Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny, were when she gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Edwards, the government did not prove that they were to influence an election—that they constituted an illegal campaign contribution—and so, in effect, their use was more personal than electoral. The “Bunny Money” went to hide Edwards’ affair with Rielle Hunter, and Quinn, the baby girl whom Edwards, whose wife was dying of cancer, had with her, and whom he had persuaded an aide to claim as his own. That does not make one like him very much. The question for the jury was whether it made him a criminal.

“Thank you for the jurors,” Edwards said when he came out to speak afterward. After eight and a half days, they told Judge Catherine Eagles that they only had one verdict. The defense wanted a mistrial; the prosecution wanted more talking. Eagles read the jury an Allen charge—which basically tells them to remember their duty, that they are as smart as any jurors who could be found, that someone has to decide and to get back to work—but after just an hour more they told her that they just couldn’t.

“This is about me,” Edwards said in his press conference. He went on to talk about what he was willing to admit. “I did an awful, awful lot that was wrong. And there is no one else who was responsible for my sins.” He thanked his father and mother, and his daughter Cate, who had been there every day, having to listen to ugly “evidence about her dad, evidence about her mom.” He also mentioned Emma Claire and Jack, the fourteen- and ten-year-olds, and then said what everyone wondered whether he might:

And finally, my precious Quinn, who I love more than any of you could ever imagine.

He said that he was grateful for Quinn, and all of his children. And so unless the government wants to go through this all again, that’s it. Edwards—former Senator, Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee in 2004, contender in 2008—could have faced thirty years in jail.
Now he won’t even lose his law license; he said that he didn’t think God was done with him. “All I can say is thank goodness that we live in a country that has the kind of system we have.”

What kind of system is that, though? As I wrote recently at Daily Comment, this case did matter. It asked a jury to think about what we consider the boundaries of the political life to be, and where and when a campaign begins and ends. It may have mattered to the jury that by the time Mellon gave her money it was pretty clear to everyone that Edwards was not going to be President, ever; that was less the case with money Fred Baron, who had been Edwards’s finance chair in the 2004 race and helped raise funds for him the next time, came up with for Hunter. And it should give anyone cause to think hard about the tendency of candidates to bend themselves and their careers toward a handful of wealthy donors—or even just one. This will be an even more critical question in the post-Citizens United era. The Edwards trial put the question in crude terms—What do you owe the rich donor who helped hide your mistress?—but a lot of politicians have a lot of debts as well as secrets that are increasingly inaccessible to the public.

Mellon did not testify. She is a hundred and one years old—she looks middle-aged in the photographs of her conferring with Jackie Kennedy. Her money comes from everything from Listerine to banking, and there is a lot of it. She had an interior decorator, Bryan Huffman, who endorsed checks supposedly for pieces of furniture that cost more than a hundred thousand dollars; in Bunny terms, that was a way to be inconspicuous. He also told the jury that she was “euphoric” when she spoke to Edwards; it “always made her extremely happy.” She liked him, and she believed deeply in what she thought he believed when he talked about helping poor people. She also thought, according to Huffman, that the twenty-three-hundred-dollar limit on individual campaign contributions was pretty low.

The same word might be applied to Edwards, and to the political process he played to. Trying to make a point about responsibility, he said, in his press conference, “I don’t have to go any further than the mirror.” Did he ever?

Photograph by Sara D. Davis/Getty Images.