The legal battle over a sex tape allegedly showing former Sen. John Edwards and former mistress Rielle Hunter is expected to further unfold in a North Carolina court Friday.
Former Edwards aide Andrew Young and his wife, Cheri, are expected to appear in court to contest a temporary restraining order forbidding them from disseminating the videotape and seeking its return to Hunter.
In court filings, Hunter said she is seeking the return of “a personal video recording that depicted matters of a very private and personal nature.”
The Youngs say they possess “a video recording showing Senator Edwards engaged in sexual activities with a woman who, from all indications, is not his wife and who the Youngs believe to be Ms. Hunter, based upon her appearance,” court documents say.
The woman on the tape is visibly pregnant, the Youngs say. That means the video might not be the one specified in the restraining order, because Hunter said that tape was created in September 2006, the Youngs say.
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If she were pregnant in September 2006, “this means that, as a matter of human biology, Ms. Hunter would have given birth no later than June 2007,” the Youngs say.
Hunter was pregnant in 2007 and gave birth to Edwards’ daughter Frances Quinn on Feb. 27, 2008.
In the court documents, the Youngs suggest that Hunter might have mistaken when the video was made. Even if that is the case, they say, Hunter abandoned the videotape in the trash at their home and made no effort to recover it until almost two years after she had left their home.
Friday’s court proceeding is the latest development in a saga involving one-time Democratic presidential hopeful Edwards.
In January, he admitted that he had fathered a child with Hunter, a videographer who worked on his campaign.
Edwards, 56, had publicly denied paternity for more than a year. About a week after his admission, Edwards confirmed reports that he had legally separated from his wife, Elizabeth.
Those announcements came just before Andrew Young released an embarrassing book about the Edwardses and his campaign.
In the book, Young portrays John Edwards as a cold, calculating and reckless politician willing to deny fathering a daughter, risk his marriage and put the Democratic Party in potential political jeopardy — all in the name of pursuing the presidency.
After Hunter became pregnant, Young says in the book, he agreed to the North Carolina senator’s request to lie, allowed Hunter to live in his home and say he was the father, though Young was married with three children.
