Article Courtesy of People.com
Proving the title of her new memoir, Resilience, to be accurate, Elizabeth Edwards sheds some highly personal insights into her life, her health and her husband’s infidelity with Oprah Winfrey, in a TV interview to air on The Oprah Winfrey Show Thursday. A companion article also appears in the June issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.
Speaking exclusively with Edwards – as well as with her husband, the former presidential candidate, John Edwards – in the couple’s 28,000-sq.-ft. home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Winfrey inquires after the state of the couple’s marriage. “Is it a day-by-day thing?” asks Winfrey.
“Neither one of us is out the door,” replies Elizabeth, according to a partial transcript of the interview provided PEOPLE by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions, “so I guess it’s day by day, but maybe it’s month by month.”
In terms of domestic arrangements after it was made known to Elizabeth that John was carrying on an extra-marital affair, she says that the two of them are “still living together.” Asks Winfrey, “Are you still in love with him?”
Replies Elizabeth: “You know, that’s a complicated question.”
The Other Woman
In her book, to be published next Tuesday, Edwards slams Rielle Hunter, the woman with whom Edwards had the 2006 affair. Although she never uses Hunter’s name in the book, Elizabeth paints her as a desperate groupie who seduced John Edwards.
Speaking to Winfrey, Elizabeth relates, “What John said is that this woman spotted him in the hotel in which he was staying. He was meeting someone in the restaurant bar area, and she verified with someone who he worked with that it was John. John went to dinner at a nearby restaurant, and when he walked back to the hotel she was standing in front of the hotel. She said to him, ‘You are so hot.’ “
As for Hunter, “This person is very different from me, and really very different from him,” says Elizabeth. “We’re basically old-fashioned people. So, this was a pretty big leap for him. Maybe it’s being so different is what was attractive.”
“The other woman has a baby,” Winfrey notes. “And there is great speculation that your husband, John Edwards, is the father of that baby.”
“That’s what I understand,” says Elizabeth. “I’ve seen a picture of the baby. I have no idea. It doesn’t look like my children, but I don’t have any idea.”
Do you think marriage can survive infidelity? Would you stay with a partner who cheated on you? Leave your comments below.
Elizabeth Edwards Talks Marriage After Infidelity
