Here is the full video and transcript of former Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards appearance on ABC News Nightline on August 8, 2008.

John Edwards admitted to ABC News in an interview with Bob Woodruff Friday that he repeatedly lied about an extramarital affair with a 42-year old campaign employee, but strenuously denied being involved in paying the woman hush money or fathering her newborn child. The former Democratic U.S. senator from North Carolina said he would be willing to take a paternity test and divulge the results publicly.

“Two years ago I made a very serious mistake, a mistake that I am responsible for and no one else. In 2006, I told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for his forgiveness. And we have kept this within our family since that time.”

Photo: John Edwards with his family, January 30, 2008 announcement that he is leaving the Presidential campaign.

Edwards, 55, said he told his entire family about the affair after it ended in 2006, and that his wife Elizabeth, who has incurable breast cancer, was “furious” but that their marriage would survive. The couple have three children, Cate, 25, Emma, 9, and Jack, 7. When he confessed his affair to his wife, “she was mad,” Edwards said.

“She was angry,” he said. “I think ‘furious’ would be a good way to describe it. She didn’t understand. We both went through a process of trying to figure out how it happened, why it happened.” Late Friday evening, Elizabeth Edwards posted a message on her blog, saying that she and her children will stand by Edwards.

“Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some – most recently – caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences,” she wrote on http://elizabethedwards.dailykos.com/. “None of these has been easy.  But we have stood with one another through them all.  Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.”

She too, denied in the blog post that Hunter’s child was fathered by her husband.

Source: Edwards Admits Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate

Top photo: John Edwards and ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff (Photo credit: ABC News)

See also:

• Transcript: John Edwards Interview
• John Edwards’ statement

Related post:

• John Edwards Admits Affair with Rielle Hunter

Video: Nightline: John Edwards Affair, Full Interview & Transcript 8-8-08

After months of vehement denials and in the aftermath of The National Enquirer’s investigation, former Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards finally admitted that he had an affair with Rielle Hunter.

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extramarital affair with a novice filmmaker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

UPDATE – Watch the entire Nightline interview: Video: Nightline: John Edwards Affair, Full Interview & Transcript 8-8-08

Rielle Hunter photo

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter’s baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby’s birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

Top Photo: John Edwards with his family, January 30, 2008 announcement that he is leaving the Presidential campaign.

Photo: John Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards – May 2008

Edwards said he told his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family about the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

“The story is false, it’s completely untrue, it’s ridiculous,” Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

The former Senator said his wife had not known about the meeting.

Source: Edwards Admits Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate

Top photo: John Edwards, January 30, 2008 announcing that he is leaving the presidential campaign.

Here is a news report on the John Edwards affair.



Here is a CNN News report on Elizabeth Edwards

Here is the Rielle Hunter interview on “Extra” in which she discusses John Edwards and the documentaries she produced for the John Edwards campaign.

Here are two of the Webisodes that Rielle Hunter produced for John Edwards.

Rielle Hunter Webisode 1 – Plane Truths



Rielle Hunter Webisode 2 – Golden Rule

via – Right Pundits – Rielle Hunter Is John Edwards’ Girlfriend

John Edwards Admits Affair with Rielle Hunter

The New York Post is downright overjoyed ….”And There He Ho’s Again … ‘Wicked’ Spitzer Linked to Busty Busted Madame’s Biz”….

Kristin Billie Davis

Disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been identified as a long-standing client of a second high-priced call-girl ring, The Post has learned.

The ex-governor regularly patronized Wicked Models, the Manhattan-based operation taken down Tuesday, according to financial documents and other evidence unearthed in a yearlong prostitution in vestigation, law-enforcement sources said.

The revelation comes three weeks after Spitzer was outed as “Client-9″ in a separate federal hooker probe involving the New Jersey-based Emperors Club VIP.

At the center of the new ring is Kristin “Billie” Davis, a busty bottle blonde who hails from a ough-and-tumble California trailer park. She has a reputation for hard-partying, shameless self-promotion and a rumored 10,000-name-long client list.

Davis’ alleged multimillion-dollar empire was smashed by city vice cops as she made plans to skip town. Prosecutors say she netted some $2 million last year by pimping out ladies of the night for as much as $1,000 an hour through four Web sites.

They noted she has openly boasted of total earnings of $6 million, and has been in operation since at least 2004.

(More.)

We are reminded of the scene in “Touch of Evil” with Orson Wells’ Quinlan asking Marlene Dietrich’s Tanya about his future…..

Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me.
Tanya: You haven’t got any.
Quinlan: What do you mean?
Tanya: Your future is all used up.

Billboard speculates about Ashley Dupre’s potential stardom. The Wall Street Journal goes gah-gah over the Ashley Dupre mashups. (You can watch plenty of them right here.) Slate roamed the blogosphere and gave us a link feast. Gawker gawked in retrospect of what a week it was, with Client 9 unmasked as Eliot Spitzer, and Kristen unmasked as Ashley Alexandra Dupre.

Sit back, relax, watch the mashups, and let history decide whether Ashley Dupre will take her place alongside Britney Spears.

“Eliot Spitzer sings Ashley Dupre”

A WSJ pick, mixes “What We Want” with Snoop Dogg’s, “Sensual Seduction.”

WSJ’s second pick, The Gov Spitzer “What We Want” Video – music by “Kristen”



“Ashley Alexandra Dupré – What we want (feat. Da Gov)” has some very amusing visuals.

We’ll add more as we find them.

The New York Times reveals the bio and the photographs of the escort of Eliot Spitzer, the infamous Client Number 9,

Kristen, described in a federal affidavit as having a Feb. 13 rendezvous with Mr. Spitzer at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, has spent the last few days in her ninth-floor rental in an upscale apartment building in the Flatiron district. On Monday, she made a brief appearance in federal court as a witness in the case against four people charged with operating the prostitution ring, Emperor’s Club V.I.P. In a series of telephone interviews on Tuesday night, she said she had slept very little over the past week due to the stress from the case.

“I just don’t want to be thought of as a monster,” the woman said as she told the tiniest tidbits of her story. Born Ashley Youmans but now known as Ashley Alexandra Dupre, she spoke softly and with good humor as she added with significant understatement: “This has been a very difficult time. It is complicated.”

She has not been charged. The lawyer appointed to represent her, Don D. Buchwald, told a magistrate judge in court on Monday that she had been subpoenaed to testify in a grand jury investigation. Asked to swear that she had accurately filled out and signed a court financial affidavit, she responded affirmatively.

[...]

On her MySpace page, Ms. Dupre writes of her “odyssey to New York from New Jersey through North Carolina, Miami, D.C., Virginia and Austin, Texas;” public records show that she lived in Belmar, N.J., in 2001, and in North Carolina in 2003. She owns a company, created in 2005, called Pasche New York, which her lawyer said was an entertainment business designed to further her singing career.

The Times has awarded Ashley Alexandra Dupre her very own topic page.

Ending the resignation speculation which became the resignation countdown….

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, reeling from revelations that he had been a client of a prostitution ring, announced his resignation today, becoming the first governor of New York to be forced from office in nearly a century.

Mr. Spitzer, appearing somber and with his wife at his side, said his resignation is to be effective Monday, and that Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson would be sworn in to replace him.

“I am deeply sorry that I did not live up to what was expected of me,” he said. “To every New Yorker, and to all those who believed in what I tried to stand for, I sincerely apologize.”

“Over the course of my public life, I have insisted — I believe correctly — that people regardless of their position or power take responsibility for their conduct,” he added. “I can and will ask no less of myself. For this reason, I am resigning from the office of governor.”

Mr. Spitzer is the first governor of New York to resign from office since 1973, when Nelson A. Rockefeller stepped down to devote himself to a policy group, and the first to be forced from office since William Sulzer was impeached and removed from his post in 1913 in a scandal over campaign contribution fraud.

In the two days since news of Mr. Spitzer’s involvement in the prostitution ring surfaced, he has been engaged in an intense legal and family debate about whether to resign or, as aides said his wife was urging, to stay on.

Mr. Spitzer, who had been holed up at his apartment at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street in Manhattan since issuing an apology on Tuesday, emerged at about 11:15 a.m. Wednesday with his wife by his side and got into a black S.U.V., which headed for his headquarters on Third Avenue as news helicopters followed above.

On Tuesday, as Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat, contemplated his next move, the New York political world remained in a suspended state, with cries — even from fellow Democrats — growing louder for him to step down.

In one of the last and desperate rounds of the end game, a top Spitzer administration official reached out to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s staff on Tuesday to see if the governor could avoid an impeachment vote. But the prospects were grim.

And so the curtain falls on Spitzer’s gubernatorial term.

More on Spitzer’s successor David A. Paterson is here. Politico also discusses this unexpected new governor.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has been compared to Eliot Ness for his unrelenting pursuit and prosecution of corruption in high places. The revelation of his previously secret identity as “Client Number 9” seems straight out of Shakespeare.

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer built his career on the moral high ground, but faces a fall suffered by Greek gods and Shakespearean characters through his own hubris or exaggerated sense of self-pride.

That scenario, say psychologists, is as old as time: Men who seemingly have it all but tempt fate to risk everything — family, reputation and even power.

Spitzer — who during eight years as an aggressive attorney general was compared to Eliot Ness, the legendary FBI man who brought down Al Capone — is now allegedly Client 9 in a federal investigation of an upscale prostitution ring.

Powerful men who fall from the pinnacle of their careers have much in common, according to experts consulted by ABC News.

“It’s a blind spot more than risk,” said Mark L. Held, a Denver-area psychologist who specializes in overachievers. “They have a certain arrogance who think they can get away with it.”

“They have a tragic Shakespearean character flaw,” he said. “The person with everything, who should be the last person to risk it, does. Their power of success has gone to their head.”

How the Mighty Fall

The fallen power brokers often leave a trail of angry, disappointed loved ones and supporters in their wake.

For Dina Matos McGreevey, whose husband left the New Jersey governorship in shame and a marriage in shambles after admitting an affair with a gay aide, the Spitzer news has unearthed old feelings of “crushing pain.”

“They both had such promising careers,” McGreevey told ABCNEWS.com. “They worked all their lives to achieve that goal, and then he made a decision that not only effects them, but their family. The wife and children are the victims.”

Powerful men who risk their marriages with dalliances are “arrogant enough they believe they are beyond reproach,” acccording to McGreevey, who said the emotional blow is like “death without a corpse.”

U.S. political history is strewn with the wreckage of sexual scandals. For many years, mainstream journalists had a gentleman’s agreement not to write or air stories about the private lives of politicians. That all changed with Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.

The article continues.

In a very short press conference, Spitzer admitted his actions were at variance with his sworn duties as governor.

The Eliot Spitzer sex scandal is widely discussed … everywhere, particularly at Gawker which analyzes Spitzer headlines and critiques late night television Spitzer jokes.

And the videos are unrelenting as the public lens examines the scandal.

The David Letterman Top 10 List of Eliot Spitzer Excuses.

For those curious about the Emperors Club VIP, the escort service that designated Eliot Spitzer Client Number 9, this is a mashup of the Eliot Spitzer press conference and images from the Emperor Club VIP Web site.



And in the truth is stranger than fiction category, here is a short film from the 1950s, “Eliot Needs a Prostitute.”