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Former Girlfriend of John Edwards Says She Won't Seek Paternity Test of Her Baby

by Gopalan on Aug 10 2008 2:32 PM

Rielle Hunter, the former girlfriend of US presidential aspirant John Edwards, has said she won’t seek a paternity test for her child. So whether John Edwards is the father of the 5-month-old child will remain unanswered for some more time.

He had confessed to the affair in a TV interview, but denied he was the father of the child and suggested a paternity test to clear his name. Meanwhile Andrew Young, a campaign aide, has claimed he is the father of the child.

But the statement of Hunter, issued by her attorney Robert Gordon, skirts all such questions. It only maintains that she wont seek any paterynity test.

In the statement, Robert Gordon said that Rielle Hunter was a private citizen and that she would not comment further on the media frenzy sparked when Edwards publicly acknowledged the affair.

He said his client wanted to forever protect the privacy of her daughter, whose birth certificate from Feb. 27 carries no name on the father line.

"Furthermore, Rielle will not participate in DNA testing or any other invasion of her ... privacy now or in the future."

After months of denying the affair, Edwards admitted Friday making "a serious error in judgment" in 2006, but maintained he was not the father of her baby.

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The timing of the affair itself would make that impossible, he noted and said he was still willing to take a paternity test to clear up the question.

"Happy to take a paternity test ... would love to see it happen," he said, but it doesn’t look its happening.

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Hunter, who reportedly met Edwards in a New York bar, says she approached him with an idea to produce a series of Internet campaign videos.

 “Meeting John Edwards was interesting. He was very real and authentic. He was inspirational to me,” she said in an interview.

 “One of the great things about John Edwards is that he is so open and willing to try new things and do new things in new ways.” She added, “I’m pretty courageous by nature and I really felt like I could help in some way.”

Hunter revealeds to ExtraTV last month that she traveled with Edwards for six months and spent a great deal of time with him saying, “I was around him a lot. It was great. We went to Africa. The whole experience was life altering for me.”

Newsweek’s reporter Jonathan Darman followed Edwards during Hunter’s filming.  Darman revealed his encounter with Hunter in his August 9 Newsweek piece: "I struck up a conversation with the woman at the next event, as we waited outside. She told me her name and asked me what my astrological sign was, which I thought was a little unusual.

I told her. She smiled, and began telling me her life story: how she was working as a documentary-film maker, living with a friend in South Orange, N.J., but how she’d previously had ’many lives.’

She’d worked, she said, as an actress and as a spiritual adviser. She was fiercely devoted to astrology and New Age spirituality. She’d been a New York party girl, she’d been married and divorced, she’d been a seeker and a teacher and was a firm believer in the power of truth."

Hunter confessed her past on her Web site  Being is Free, which was taken down from the Internet last April, soon after she ended her professional relationship with former presidential candidate John Edwards.

Parts of the Web site have been preserved by Deceiver.com and TheHuffingtonPost.com, including an interview with Hunter’s ex-boyfriend McInerney, who based the main character Alison Poole on Hunter in his "Story of My Life."

"It was narrated in the first person," McInerney wrote on Hunter’s Web site  about his novel, "from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa [Rielle]."

The back cover of McInerney’s novel, first published in 1988, described Rielle’s book character as "a budding actress already fatally well-versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel, falling in and out of lust, and abusing other people’s credit cards."




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