The New York Times—late to coverage of philandering by John Edwards—is making up for lost time. The usually prissy Gray Lady may be investigating the former Democratic presidential candidate's relationship with yet another woman, this one a Duke graduate. [Radar]

TMZ has uncovered brief footage of Rielle Hunter on a game show called Lingo in 2002. Salient details: The show was hosted by Chuck Woolery of Love Connection fame (HA), and also Hunter claims to be practiced at moving on from things, even though she's now living on the dole of a supporter of John Edwards more than a year after the Democratic politician said their affair ended. Maybe she has some other reason for taking the money, other than being clingy, like a scandalous GENUINE love child. This very brief excerpt is pretty convincing/damning/irrefutable.

So John Edwards' maybe-babymama Rielle Hunter was a blabbermouth. Have you ever known anyone who had an affair with a married man? How'd you find out? Rhetorical question, yes! So, Radar wants to know why Rielle couldn't keep her freaking jaw in place about boning John Edwards. She would be so much better off if she'd just had a little discretion! Hey, did you ever think on how a widely-used synonym for "affair" is "indiscretion"? No, it's not so much that they go together like peanut butter and jelly; more like they're the exact same thing. What sort of patently talentless dilettante chats up a politician in a bar and manages to secure a lucrative contract with his campaign and either his or his close confidante's participation in unprotected sex? Answer: someone who shares the personality traits of a Donna Rice or Monica Lewinsky — the kind of woman who to enters beauty pageants, shares her innermost secrets with Linda Tripp or in this case blabs about married John from North Carolina to her web developer and anybody else who'll listen.Why do you think that whenever politicians from Bill Clinton to John Edwards stray, you always hear about the extensive efforts made by their staffers and confidantes to keep them away from their accomplices to infidelity? Because people like Rielle Hunter are not generally subtle; people like Rielle Hunter would equate "subtle" with a gentle snap of one's thong! In my years as a chronic oversharing discretion lacker I have found we often attract the same type. It's no accident Monica gave that exclusive interview to someone who just told the world how she used to screw Alan Greenspan! Which brings us to Rielle's ex Jay McInerney. He says he wrote about Rielle because he was "intrigued and appalled" by her behavior. I bet that in Rielle's case he would switch the verb to "bored" at this point. Which is what is so exceptionally unboring about Rielle Hunter! She changed her name, but unlike anti-pornography activist conservawife Donna Rice Hughes she never changed her ability to summon the energy to hit on powerful men and babble incessantly about it to all her blabbermouth friends. She would probably claim it was because she and John shared True Love. You might claim she is simply an incurable narcissist. I would say you're both right!

John Edwards will surely one day be exposed as a despicable liar-one so manipulative that he could deny the obvious even when "stripped bare" during his confessional Nightline interview. Unfortunately, today is not the day.

"The late Diana, Princess of Wales, was a big fan of John Edwards' lover Rielle Hunter... [At] a dinner party she hosted in London, [Diana] had someone read the dirty parts of Jay McInerney's 'Story of My Life' to guests while the waiters stood behind the chairs and tried not to laugh." [Post]

Octogenarian Post gossipeuse Cindy Adams reports that the Enquirer tomorrow will run a photo of Rielle Hunter holding the baby John Edwards maybe held in that photo that was maybe him in that hotel room he met Rielle at. They will have "proof" that it is the same baby and "proof" that it is not photoshopped. Cindy Adams also reports this: "ENOUGH already with New York's financial woes. Soon, instead of a torch, the Statue of Liberty will hold up a tin cup and pencils." [NYP]

As first noted by the tenacious John Edwards-hounders at Deceiver.com, it seems Times readers are mighty interested in the philandering Democrat, even though many journalists said they simply shouldn't care about the scandal. As shown in the screenshot above, "John Edwards" is the most popular search term over the past week on nytimes.com. If the newspaper was crass enough to actually shape coverage around such reader-interest metrics, it might admit as miscalculation the assertion by the Times' campaign coverage editor last week that while the Edwards scandal was "fair game for journalism," it wasn't a "high priority" because "there are a lot of big issues.... and we have finite resources." After the jump, CNN congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin on why her viewers neither wanted nor needed Edwards scandal coverage:

Years before Rielle Hunter carried on a torrid and weird affair with John Edwards (and years after her presumably torrid and weird affair with Jay McInerney) she tried her hand at acting in the moving pictures. Here she is in her star turn as "lady who holds a microphone up to Denzel" in the classic film Ricochet. As far as we know, we're the first ones to track down and digitize this scene—and probably the first to watch the movie Ricochet since 1992 or so. (Well, we didn't watch it. But someone at the office had to!) Enjoy!

The National Enquirer is having an amazing week thanks to its coverage of John Edwards' philandering, but the supermarket tabloid is probably still going to die along with troubled parent company American Media Inc., the Times' David Carr reports for tomorrow's paper. It doesn't seem to matter that three of the best papers in the country all ran stories about how the Enquirer was right about Edwards and they were wrong or that the tabloid still owns the probably-not-finished scandal. AMI is so deep in the hole — nearly $1 billion! — that most analysts aren't even keeping track of the Edwards coverage or anything else about the company because they've written it off. One gave this fairly devastating quote to Carr, anonymously:

Comedian Roseanne Barr took to her website yesterday and unloaded on everyone. Hey, it's fun! On Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: "jon voight your evil spawn angelina jolie and her vacuous hubby brad pitt make about forty million dollars a year in violent psychopathic movies and give away three of it to starving children trying to look as if they give a fuck about humanity as they spit out more dunces that will consume more than their fair share and wreck the earth even more." And that's tepid compared with what she serves up for Voight himself, George Bush, John Edwards, and his former mistress Rielle Hunter.

This photo—of John Edwards being filmed by occasional mistress Rielle Hunter—reportedly was taken December 30, 2006. As we all know, Edwards claims he ended his affair and confessed to his wife in 2006. Hunter's contract with the Edwards campaign ended on December 31, at which point there are no more photos of her at campaign events. So. Either Edwards is lying about the date of the end of the affair and his confession, or... this is the night he did it? The campaign stopped paying her too, except for that $14,086 payment they made to Hunter in April of 2007. This story was so much simpler when everyone was just denying everything. See the full, uncropped photo at DBKP.

The precious Times has finally condescended to do some original reporting the John Edwards scandal, pulling from the tabloidy muck a scoop establishing that Edwards loyalist Fred Baron, who can't quite recall these things clearly, admits he maybe set Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter and Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young up with two separate lawyer buddies of his, and also maybe paid their legal fees?? All this happened right before one of the lawyers announced that his new client Hunter was not carrying Edwards' love child, and then the other lawyer announced that her new client Young was the father of the love child. And you know, funny thing, both of the lawyers forgot to mention their ties to one another via Baron. Here are some great quotes where swaggering genius lawyer Baron (pictured) pretends he's an Alzheimer's patient, to the Times:

Alan Colmes is famous as a nightly sacrifice victim to the Repubican Gods who run Fox News Channel. Al Franken once called him the "zeta male" of the duo Hannity & Colmes and joked that Colmes' duties included making coffee and cleaning Fox honcho Roger Ailes' private bathroom. But something has transformed the little runt. Maybe he's taken heart in the nation's mounting hatred of all things Republican. Or maybe the John Edwards scandal has energized him. Or perhaps he just really, really hates John McCain. Anyway, here's a great clip in which Sean Hannity almost beats him to death. Click the video icon. [YouTube via Wonkette]

At some point in your professional life as a media person, have you come into contact with Rielle Hunter, mistress of disgraced ex-presidential candidate John Edwards? Now is your chance to cash in! Hunter, as we've learned, has led a long and storied life among artists, writers, and men she sleeps with in the hopes that they're "powerful." One such man was Jay McInerney, who used a thinly fictionalized Hunter as the narrator of one of his "novels" (like Tumblrs but longer and on paper). That novel, the mostly forgotten Story of My Life, has just been reprinted and is fast climbing the Amazon sales charts. It's currently 226 at the internet bookseller. Last week it was, like, nowhere. Will all these voracious new readers enjoy the book? Michiko Kakutani didn't like it that much back in 1988. (Her review is also an awesome early example of her insane obsession with comparing every jaded young protagonist to Holden fucking Caulfield. Haven't you read like a million books, Michiko?? Find one more example of an adolescent narrator please!)

John Edwards mistress and new age nut Rielle Hunter had her humble beginnings under a different name: Lisa Druck. Growing up in Ocala, Florida (I've been there: grass, trees, Spanish moss, springs, that's it), her favorite pastime was riding show horses. But a tragedy befell her horse, and Druck eventually ended up as a drugged-out party girl in New York. Could this dark incident involving family, crime, and equine assassination have been the thing that eventually drove Rielle Hunter into the eager arms of John Edwards? If you're a new-age theorist like Hunter, the answer is a resounding "Yes!":

John Edwards is a lawyer, so he tends to be careful about, you know, "lies." Like Bill Clinton before him, he tries to make them technically true and hope no one notices the outs he leaves himself. Today, the Enquirer claims (reports?? who knows with them) that Edwards "restarted" his affair with Rielle Hunter after he says he confessed to his wife and ended it. Also he "was sexually involved with Rielle when she became pregnant." (Speaking of pregnant-click to see the totally helpful contextual ad that pops up when you hover over that word at the Enquirer's site.) Ha ha also: "Experts are now calling for a federal investigation into Edwards' use of campaign funds." Experts in what? So John's lying about everything, right? Kind of... "The story is false, it's completely untrue, it's ridiculous," Edwards said when confronted with the first Enquirer story on his affair. Then, when he admitted the affair this month, he explained that that wasn't actually a lie: "When a supermarket tabloid told a version of the story, I used the fact that the story contained many falsities to deny it. But being 99 percent honest is no longer enough." As others have noted, that math does not make very much sense. But Edwards is helped in his crusade to be 99% honest by the fact that flaky Rielle Hunter seems unreliable and prone to flights of fancy. So her affair with Edwards actually happened, yes, but how many of the details as she recounts them are accurate? How many of the stories she told her friends are based on reality and not fantasy? Sources close to Hunter can only reveal what Hunter told them, which is hardly concrete proof of anything. So is this story true? Did the affair start up again? In Edwards' confession, he said: "But that misconduct took place for a short period in 2006. It ended then." That misconduct. Leaving himself room to not admit to a further, separate misconduct that happened later. See what he did there?

"A source who has seen [Rielle] Hunter's baby says, 'She looks like John Edwards in a onesie.'" [Daily News]

New York's Daily Intel has a great little roundup of all the crazies (and not so crazies) who fell into the orbit of Miss Rielle Hunter, the lady who bedded John Edwards and then had a miracle baby with some other guy, mysteriously. They include: Robert Philip McGovern, the "spiritual healer" who arranged the meeting between Edwards and Hunter at the Hilton last month (you know, where the Enquirer photogs were). And Pigeon O'Brien, one of those "friends" of Hunter's who keep contradicting her story to the press. And the guy who keeps sending Hunter $15,000 checks every month. Not because Edwards told him to, mind you! Just because, you know, he feels like it, ok? Get off his back. But leave it to Us Weekly to discover the best and most bizarre Hunter connection yet: Rielle Hunter appeared in the movie Overboard. Fucking Overboard! The insane Kurt Russel/Goldie Hawn movie in which Hawn falls off a boat and then gets amnesia and Kurt Russel pretends she's his wife to teach her a lesson, or something. And Rielle Hunter is in this movie, credited, according to Us, as Lisa Hunter. Someone please find her scene on YouTube? Or something? She is "Grant's Girlfriend."

• Nightline's exclusive interview with John Edwards on Friday night? It didn't pose much competition to the Olympics on NBC. [THR]

Where did John Edwards and Rielle Hunter have their first romantic interlude? At the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, which happens to be one of Edwards favorite hotels in town. (We're guessing, however, that the hotel's owner, Jonathan Tisch, won't be including this little fact in the official hotel brochure in the near future.) But Edwards isn't the only married man who picked the five-star property to carry on behind his wife's back. In 1997, former football star Frank Gifford—the husband of Kathie Lee—bedded nude model Suzan Johnson in suite 521. (Gifford later claimed a tabloid had set him up.) After the jump, a few of the hotels where some of the rich and powerful have cheated on their wives, stashed their goomahs, and/or ran up a huge mini-bar bill.