I’m still grappling with the hour I spent watching Oprah interview Rielle Hunter. I honestly don’t think I was prepared for “The Full Rielle”. She is… so… disgusting. And I really am searching for the best way to describe her. The one word I kept thinking throughout the interview was “inappropriate”. Like, Rielle had inappropriate reactions to questions, smiling and laughing as she discussed her multi-year affair with John Edwards. She was inappropriate in her description of the evolution of her “love” for “Johnny”. She was inappropriate in her denials, in her hedges, in her New Age-y bullsh-t lingo. She was a lot of other things too: horrible, stupid, moronic, hypocritical, delusional, crazy, asinine, and, to borrow from Robert Downey Jr., “f-cking babyshambles”.

That being said, I did have one or two moment where I honestly agreed with Rielle’s worldview. I too don’t believe that husbands can be “stolen” and that men are not possessions that two women should “fight” over. So I gave her that one point. But I took away, like, one million points every time she tried to elicit sympathy for herself, every time she laughed about having an affair, every time I saw her dumb eyes glaze over when Oprah tried to ask her something more complicated than “What does this crystal do?” Anyway, here’s a clip of the interview and some highlights:

On why she was doing this interview with Oprah now:
“It felt more right after Johnny claimed paternity publicly.”

On home-wrecking:
“It is not my experience that a third party can wreck a home. I believe that problems exist before a third party comes into the picture.”

On people’s angry reactions:
“It hurts. It hurts because they don’t know you.”

On people seeing her negatively:
“Because of the affair. And also because a lot of people bought into the myth of the marriage. The fairybook marriage … and I destroyed it.”

On how they met.
“He lit up like a Christmas tree, just white lights, just like bright as can be. I turned to him and said, ‘You’re so hot.’ And he practically jumped in my arms.”

On Edwards when they met:
“He wanted help. He wanted to be more authentic. He wanted to live a life of truth.”

On whether she spent the night the first time they met:
“On that I say, ‘Fade to Black.'”

On the Edwards marriage:
“Being a person who is committed to truth and living a lot where you’re not hiding, it’s almost like a cosmic joke to fall in love with someone who is living a big lie.”

On guilt:
“What’s so hard about it is that the power of the love does override all the issues that come up, all the judgment … our hearts were louder than the minds.”

On when why Edwards announced his candidacy in the midst of the affair:
“He was in extreme conflict about it … He was, I believe, addicted to campaigning.”

On why she thought he shouldn’t run:
“I’m conservative that way, I believe in truth. I believe you need to get all your ducks in a row and leave a life of integrity before you step out into the public.”

On watching Edwards renew his vows with Elizabeth:
“Someone who stands before God and makes a vow crushes me on the inside. That anyone can do that … I could never do that.”

On how he reacted to the news that Rielle was pregnant while he was still running for president of the United States:
“He was very gracious … I wouldn’t say he was supportive. I’d say he had a lot of issues with the timing.”

On birth control:
“We never used birth control.”

On why she agreed to the lie about the paternity of her daughter Frances Quinn:
“If he got out of the race because of her, or me being pregnant with her, and always had this thing in his head, ‘I could have been president, and some blame toward her at all; if she somehow flipped this inside her head, that it was her fault for coming into the world, that was too hard for me.”

On why she made a sex tape:
“I don’t think there was a lot of thought about what was going on in the heat of the moment … Afterward, we thought, ‘Well that was not a great idea.'”

On why she isn’t openly dating him:
“I’m a private person; it’s hard, I need boundaries. Right now I have boundaries around my personal life.”

On what she’s learned:
“I have become a better person through the process. More compassionate, more aware.”

On what Edwards thought of her doing this interview:
“He didn’t think it was a good idea.”

On having the affair:
“Our hearts were louder than the minds.”

On the pantless GQ spread:
“What I was thinking was, I would like to have one sexy shot where the world can see me as — as a beautiful woman, as opposed to all those photos that are out there of me looking like some Wicked Witch of the West, the ugliest thing you could ever imagine.”

More on the “home-wrecking”:
“I followed my heart, and I believe it was the right thing to do, which is weird — I get how weird that is — because I didn’t make a commitment to Elizabeth. I wasn’t the one lying, like, to her, and I was supporting him in his process, and his intentions never wavered. I knew that he wanted — he just had a really unique way of getting there — to live a life of truth.”

[From New York Magazine & The New York Times]

Oh, yes. She never used birth control. Dumbass.

One thing did occur to me at some point as I winced through the conversation about Edwards deciding to run for president in 2008 – seriously, how f-cking stupid, immoral, ethically corrupt, ridiculous and f-cked up is John Edwards? It’s one thing to look at Rielle and think, “Well, stupid is as stupid does” but then you have to look at John Edwards. Why? Why does he exist? How did he even get elected to anything? Why was he enabled to this pinnacle of self-destruction? How big a f-cking fraud is he?