In August 2008, I reported an interesting tidbit in the then unfolding John Edwards scandal. A former campaign worker of Edwards ran into him at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on June 18th. Edwards was sneaking in from the basement elevator. Using this elevator means you can bypass the lobby and shoot straight upstairs.

Edwards, I reported, was having a clandestine meeting with Rielle Hunter and their then three month old daughter, Quinn. It was a few days before Father’s Day, and Edwards’ other children and his wife Elizabeth were home in North Carolina. Edwards had already denied that Quinn was his child and was still fudging the truth of the affair.

But now People magazine has a picture in their new issue of Edwards with Quinn dated June 20, 2008. It’s taken at the Beverly Hilton. Edwards looks like he’s just come from the gym. So we can conclude he was there for a few days visiting with his lover and secret child. In the end, it’s nice to learn the end, or the other side of a story that I reported.

A month later, The National Enquirer– tipped off by someone–found Edwards in the hotel and trapped him in a public bathroom.They didn’t know  then that he’d already been with Hunter and the baby a month earlier.

Here’s my original story: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,409964,00.html

Rielle Hunter’s book is being excerpted in Radar Online, the AP, and ABC News has an exclusive on it. Hunter is quick to say John Edwards had other mistresses. Or he lied to her about other mistresses. But what about her other boyfriends? At the television show “24” in Hollywood, one man was very concerned when he heard Hunter was pregnant. He thought he was the father. He’d put Hunter up in an apartment, according to my sources. He was married. Ironically, his marriage had to withstand other tests once Edwards was named as the dad.

Is that in Hunter’s book, coming out next week?

Hunter clearly came to Hollywood with dollar signs in her eyes when she divorced husband Kip Hunter in 2000. and moved to Hollywood. “It was clear,” says Emmy-nominated cinematographer George Mooradian, “that she wanted to be in the movie business.”

As I wrote in 2008:

Rielle Hunter was first known as Lisa Druck. But some time in the late ’80s, after moving to Los Angeles from New York, the Florida native met and married Alexander “Kip” Munro Hunter III. During her decade-long marriage, her father-in-law was the prosecutor in the celebrated Ramsey case in Boulder, Colo.

Kip’s father, Alexander Munro Hunter, was the famous Boulder district attorney who, beginning in 1996, tried but failed to find and prosecute 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey’s killer. The crime — still unsolved — remains an international sensation.

It seems Rielle — known then as Lisa — hooked up with Kip in Los Angeles after her run as a Manhattan party girl and inspiration for a 1987 Jay McInerney novel. The author recently recalled that the book “was narrated in the first person from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa.”

According to his own bio, Kip Hunter lived in New York from around 1990 to about 2005, and he had his own law firm, Hunter & Associates, where he “specialized in general corporate representation.”

In 2000, Lisa Druck re-emerged in Los Angeles as newly single Rielle Hunter, writer and producer of a 20-minute-long comedy called “Billy Bob and Them,” which she also acted in and self-distributed.

Mooradian worked on “Billy Bob and Them.” When he met Rielle, he said, she was just getting or had gotten a divorce.He conceded he was paid about $50, if that, to shoot the low-budget film in Hunter’s “very nice” Los Angeles-area home that he supposed she’d gotten in the divorce.

The film, he said, didn’t have much of a plot. “It was very New Age-y. It had something to do with altars and temples and crystals.” The shoot lasted two days.

Mooradian told me: “She definitely had some connection to the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, and there was an offer to meet the Dalai Lama.”

Things have definitely changed. Hunter’s name sends a cold chill up the spines of the ‘24′ gang– and their show is about terrorism!

And there is still a much disputed story about Hunter’s friendship with actor Jeff Goldblum before he got added to “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and moved to New York. Hunter denies it, but the LA peeps can’t stop talking about it.