John Edwards and Rielle Hunter 

We realize that we just vented about our disdain for John Edwards and our love for Elizabeth Edwards.  That got us wondering something.  Who is Rielle Hunter, the woman John Edwards had an affair with?

It turns out she has had almost as many names as she has careers. She went from a New York City party girl to an aspiring actress in Los Angeles to a New-Age spiritualist and then, finally, to a political operative.

Rielle Hunter was born Lisa Druck in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and stayed in the state until her late teens, dropping out of the University of Tampa after two years.

By 1987 she was in New York and hanging out with a hard-partying group, including Bright Lights, Big City novelist Jay McInerney, whom she dated for several months. He was 30 when they met, and she was 20, McInerney says. He was inspired to write the book Story of My Life by hanging out with her and her friends.

“I was fascinated by the way they talked,” he says. “It was a different generation than my own. Today, it would come under the rubric of Valley Girl talk, the use of ‘like,’ instead of ‘to say.’ They were open speaking about sex.” Says Hunter’s older sister, Roxanne Marshall, “Rielle is the black sheep of the family. We were all raised the same way. She chose a different path.”

It sounds like her own family was embarassed by her shenanigans long before the scandalous affair with Edwards.

Hunter later moved to Los Angeles and married Alexander Hunter III, who financed the production of a play for her – a coming-of-age story about a group of tough 30-something New Yorkers and titled Savage in Limbo, recalls costar Elizabeth Dennehy. 

Dennehy recalls that Hunter called the cast together and lit some sage in the theater, “to clear the space of bad spirits and bring in the good ones. But it was all meaningful and earnest.”

In 1994 Hunter changed her first name to Rielle because “it just came to her,” according to O’Brien. Rielle is currently 44-years-old, so she would have been 30-years-old when she changed her first name.  Who does that when they are 30? 

She and Hunter divorced in 2000, and four years later, Rielle created a website called Beingisfree.com. Rielle sounds like a nut job.

It was in May 2006 when Hunter met John Edwards at a Manhattan hotel bar. And, according to Pigeon, she fell in love with the rising Democratic politician, whom she called “Love Lips.”

So they met in a bar and then she was “working” on his campaign with him? John put his mistress on the payroll then. How sleazey.