The John Edwards Love Child Saga, the NBA and the MSM

 
The blog doing the most heavy lifting on the reputed John Edwards Love Child saga is Death by 1000 Papercuts. While the story has been curiously ignored by the mainstream media, DBKP has continued digging.


The story keeps getting curiouser and curiouser, as reported Edwards love interest Rielle Hunter is allegedly being housed by a retired NBA player.

Question: What former NBA player's latest charity outreach involves providing housing for unwed, pregnant women?

Hint #1: The player and various family members have each contributed the allowable limit each to the John Edwards campaign, for a total of over $15,000.

Hint #2: The unwed, pregnant woman is actually just one: Rielle Hunter, the former producer of videos for the Edwards campaign that traveled around the country last year with the presidential candidate.

DBKP received a tip that Hunter is now living in the house of a former NBA player who is also an Edwards backer.

Again, this caused us to ask questions.

Was Rielle Hunter a professional basketball fan?

What is the connection between Hunter and the NBA player/Edwards contributor?

Will this cause any curiosity in a Mainstream Media that seems determined not to exhibit any?

Okay, so I was curious. Went to OpenSecrets and did a donor lookup.

The only ex-NBA player and heavy Edwards donor I found is Eric Montross, who is listed in Chapel Hill. That's not to say Montross is hosting Rielle, but if the DBKP story is accurate, he's someone for the MSM to check into.

Fittingly, DBKP hammers the mainstream media for its non-coverage of the John Edwards Love Child story.

[The story] doesn't excite Bob Schieffer...

A presidential candidate's alleged mistress moving close to campaign headquarters, driving around in a BMW owned by the campaign's former Director of Operations, living in a house owned by the campaign's backer, having her bills and living expenses paid for--well, who is paying them?

Doesn't matter.

That wouldn't likely excite Bob Schieffer, either.


...Unnamed source, you say?

"...it appears to me that there's absolutely nothing to it"

Good thing Deep Throat had the good sense not to leak to the Enquirer.

Bob Schieffer would have passed on that one.

But DBKP's doesn't mean to be picking on Bob Schieffer. We like Bob and always enjoyed watching "Face the Nation".

Bob's is shorthand for the attitude of the Mainstream Media.

I'm firmly convinced that the blogosphere renders the MSM increasingly irrelevant by the day.

Update: DBKP calls our attention to a curious statement in the December 19th Enquirer article:

...Young placed Rielle in a rental home in the Governor’s Club, the same gated community where he lives in a multimillion-dollar home with his wife Cheri and their young children. That home is owned by an Edwards’ backer and is less than five miles from Edwards’ national campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, N.C.

A former “Director of Operations” for Edwards’ campaign, Young’s last official position with the campaign was “North Carolina Finance Director.”

He left that job about a month ago – about the same time Rielle settled in Chapel Hill.

A source close to Young vehemently denies that he funneled campaign money to Rielle – who drives a BMW SUV registered in Young’s name.

What an odd denial! Who accused Young of funneling campaign funds to support Rielle in the first place? I wonder if any member of our crack mainstream media will bother to check into this interesting thread.

Update II: Here's something I missed from Newsweek in December of 2006 (hat tip: Luke Ford):

The [Edwards campaign] Webisodes are the brainchild of Rielle Hunter, a filmmaker who met Edwards at a New York bar where Edwards was having a business meeting. "I didn’t think it was John Edwards," Hunter recalls, "because the public persona did not mesh at all with the person who was sitting in front of me." Hunter pitched Edwards on the documentaries as a medium for bringing the "real John Edwards" to the people. Edwards still has a ways to go. In the midst of a short theme sequence that begins each Webisode, the camera lingers over the former senator’s behind as he tucks a starched white shirt into his pants [LF: 1:12 into this video]. Still, Hunter, now under contract with Edwards’s organization, says she sees the untucked John Edwards coming more and more to the fore.

The 'untucked' John Edwards?

Update III: Jezebel certainly doesn't mince words.