Rielle Hunter's quiet dignity

When the story broke, Rielle seemed the last person capable of keeping her mouth shut. She was said to consult psychics for advice and to confide details of her affair in friends with names like “Pigeon.” And yet, for two years, she has behaved with more public dignity than any other figure in the Edwards scandal. In fact, she acted with more discipline and discretion than any mistress in the recent history of sex scandals. This would hardly seem to be a title worth bragging about. After all, a mistress may have discipline, but she is still a mistress. However phony the Edwardses’ pretenses, and however dysfunctional their marriage, the fact remains that Rielle actively insinuated herself into the lives of a married couple with three children…

It has been more than two years since she earned national notoriety when the National Enquirer first alleged that she was Edwards’s secret mistress. That’s more time than it took Donna Rice to sign up as a spokesmodel for No Excuses Jeans after being revealed as the secret companion of presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1987. Two years out from the world first learning her name, Monica Lewinksy had sat down for an interview with Walters, sold her story to British journalist Andrew Morton, and launched her own line of handbags. Ashley Dupre, the prostitute who spent an evening at the Mayflower hotel with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, was selling songs on her MySpace page days after that scandal first broke and has recently written sex columns for the New York Post. Tiger Woods’s mistresses talked, posed, opined, and disappeared before we could even concentrate long enough to learn their names.