What Really Happened (31 page)

Johnny and I had both agreed that Quinn and I should move to North Carolina. He had been looking for houses for us over the phone while he was at the beach. I would find one online, and he would drive by or see if he could get inside to check it out. We had decided that Quinn and I should come look at some places the week after I testified.

He called me the Saturday before I testified. He was concerned that they were going to exploit Quinn by having me do the “perp walk” in front of the cameras. I told him I had floppy hats for her, and that that was not my biggest concern. I was mostly concerned that I was still breast-feeding and she had never been away from me for more than two hours and when she had been away, it was with people she knew. So my only choices were to leave her for nine hours in a strange place with someone she didn’t know or bring her with me, where she could be with my lawyer, whom she knew, and the woman who was going to watch Quinn. I could see her during my breaks and at lunch, but that would mean being in front of cameras.

The feds told me they would take me in the back entrance of the courthouse, away from all the cameras. Yeah, right. We pulled up and there were cameras surrounding the front
and
the back. I got out of the car and pulled Quinn out of her car seat. There were cameras behind us, with photographers screaming, “Ms. Hunter! Ms. Hunter!” As we walked, Quinn liked to look directly at the cameras, the way she just had with Vanita in June when the paparazzi got a clear shot of her. She was curious about all the screaming people. I turned Quinn’s head and told her to look at the guys in front. Of course, there were cameras at every angle. I was later raked over the coals in the media for bringing my daughter with me and accused of purposely turning her head toward “the” camera, as if there were only one. A news station took two clips of the exact same video footage with me turning Quinn’s head and spliced it together, (I assume to make our walk longer than it actually was to use as B-roll) but some reporters, including from
The New York Times
, were unable to decipher that it was the same clip spliced together and claimed that I turned Quinn’s head toward “the” camera not once but twice. Underlying message: what a terrible mother.

After I testified, Jim Conney, one of Johnny’s lawyers, thought it would be best if Johnny didn’t talk to me indefinitely. Given we have a child together, not to mention the insanity that we were attempting to deal with, I thought that advice was terrible.

A week later Quinn and I flew to North Carolina, just as Johnny and I had already discussed. We looked at a bunch of houses in Wilmington, only to learn from my lawyers that Elizabeth and Johnny had decided that Wilmington wouldn’t work. We learned this, of course, after we’d been traveling for three days and had decided on a house.

My lawyer told me that Elizabeth needed to pick where we lived. So she began house hunting.

And I’m sorry, but how crazy is it that Elizabeth had gone out house hunting for a child that she wouldn’t allow her husband to furnish with health insurance or publicly acknowledge as his own child? What kind of logic in her head allowed her to do that?

Quinn in the U-Haul, helping me pack it up. She loves to help me with any and all chores.

By this point Mimi had reached the end of her rope with Team Edwards and the media circus; she was pretty adamant about wanting us out of her house. I had given her a departure date and when that day came, I had packed up our stuff and put it in a U-Haul, but we still didn’t have a place to go because Team Edwards had not yet signed off on a house nor given us the money to move. I was going to go and stay at my lawyer’s beach house in New Jersey. And then, in the very final hours, Team Edwards sent a link to a rental house in Southport, North Carolina.

My lawyer suggested that we stay in the rental house for two months and look around North Carolina to figure out where we wanted to live. He said, “You should check out Charlotte. I hear great things about Charlotte.” Not a bad idea.

The beginning of October 2009 found me pulling a U-Haul for the first time ever, with Christine (my babysitter who flew from Santa Barbara to help me move) and Quinn in the backseat, all headed south, out of New Jersey into the great state of North Carolina.

TWENTY-THREE

Father of the Year

“Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.”

—
F
RANK
S
INATRA

A
FTER A GRUELING month-long nightmare looking at every house available in Southport, North Carolina, with a Realtor who was working for the “Team,” we finally headed to Charlotte. The second that we drove into Charlotte, I was happy. It was autumn. Trees were everywhere and stunning. Charlotte has trees like no other city I have ever seen, and I love trees. Charlotte is a fantastic place to raise a child and call home.

The first house we looked at was perfect for us. Quinn loved it. She didn’t want to leave. It was on a private street, making it difficult for paparazzi to get to us. It had a screened porch (good to keep the mosquitoes at bay), a garage (good for privacy), and a back yard (heaven for Quinn). It’s not easy to find all those qualities in Charlotte housing.

But there was a problem. Elizabeth wasn’t the one to find it so she would not allow Johnny even to go look at it. Elizabeth had to be the one who controlled all the money for the house and she was the only one who was allowed to find the house.

I was really losing patience with this control freak insanity. Johnny and Elizabeth and the Southport Realtor then got together with Amy Lothrop, a Charlotte Realtor, and searched Charlotte. They put in two offers on houses that didn’t go through and then purchased a house on Providence Road that was very nice, even though it was on a very busy street, which made it bad for the media but made it more affordable. I was very excited about moving to Charlotte and ending the house search. I must have inspected at least a hundred houses.

I packed up the U-Haul
again
. About two hours into our drive from Southport, pulling the U-Haul to the new house, it occurred to the “Team” that Quinn and I should not be allowed to move in without signing a child support agreement, so they quickly pulled something together. Obviously, they had all the power, and this was a shitty thing to do at the last minute while we were in transit. The agreement was so ridiculous that my lawyer said, “There is no way I am allowing my client to sign that.” And I agreed with my lawyer. One of their demands was to charge me rent on the house they had just bought for Quinn. The rent was to be taken out of the child support, which would have left us with basically no money. The “Team” said, “Fine. She and her daughter can’t move into the house.”

So there I was at the Marriott in Charlotte, U-Haul attached to my car, toddler attached to my hip, and no place to live. Through my tears, I asked the Team Edwards Realtor if he could stay for a day and help us find a place to live, given our terrible circumstances, made even worse because we had just spotted a weird van in the parking lot. Clearly, the
National Enquirer
was stalking the hotel. (And, in fact, they published pictures of Quinn and I in the parking lot the following week.) Thank God that, aside from all the agendas he had to work around, the Realtor actually had a heart. He stayed and helped us find a rental house.

I didn’t put my full name on the lease, and our landlord had no idea who we were. She didn’t even know my name and the Realtor wouldn’t tell her, citing privacy reasons. Of course, she found out soon thereafter because it was all over the news and the house was surrounded with media people. My neighbors quickly learned the media game and were very protective. It is amazing to me how many people do not like the media. I got texts or phone calls the second an odd car was spotted near my house.

After the lease was signed, I drove with Quinn for three hours to Apex, North Carolina, to meet the movers the following morning at the storage unit. (In September, Mimi had put all of my stuff from the rental house in Chapel Hill into storage.) That night, after three stops, we finally found a hotel near the storage unit. I fed and bathed Quinn and put her to bed. I got a text message from Johnny—I hadn’t spoken a word to him since I testified in August. The text read, “How’s Quinn?”

I was so angry that I almost threw my phone across the room. I thought of many replies, including, “Sleeping peacefully until you woke her up with your stupid text,” and, “Your daughter is great only because she has a mother who lives and breathes for her,” and “Your daughter is great no thanks to you,
motherfucker
!” Instead, I didn’t respond. I know better than to take an action in reaction. It gets you nowhere but the same place you’ve been before, and that was not a place I was interested in returning to. I wasn’t even sure how he got my new cell phone number. It turns out the Southport Realtor had given it to him.

And because the Realtor had given my number to Johnny, Elizabeth made the Realtor into the reason that she and Johnny were not going to make it as a couple and were going to divorce. I am not kidding. She really blamed a Realtor, a twenty-three-year-old kid she had known for a few months. It was
all
his fault. She
screamed
at him!

Once we settled into the rental, I immediately did what all mothers would do: I found Quinn a pediatrician, dentist, and “mommy and me” activities.

About a week into our new city, through the lawyers I was told that Johnny had presents that he wanted to give Quinn for Christmas, so a meeting was arranged under a confidentiality agreement. No one ever told me that Elizabeth was going to be there. Had I known that Elizabeth planned to be there, I would have rejected the meeting outright. I didn’t want to put my daughter in a position to be used by her crazy schemes. In fact, I didn’t find out that she had been at the Christmas present meeting with Quinn until January, when she broke the confidentiality agreement spinning it to the media as Johnny’s statement on paternity hit the airwaves. Johnny was in Haiti. When he called, I
screamed
at him. The first time ever. I have never been so angry in my entire life.

Elizabeth was a master at spin. Yes, she got Quinn Christmas presents. But she also would never admit to any behavior that didn’t present herself as the moral and wonderful person she believed herself to be, which sadly meant she never admitted to most of her behavior. When Quinn was to go under sedation for dental work at the end of December, Elizabeth called Johnny’s parents and
forbade
them from going to the hospital to be with Quinn. They said, “Sorry, Elizabeth, she is our granddaughter. We are going.”

Apparently, Johnny couldn’t bear to think of not being there for his daughter at the hospital. Elizabeth screamed at him, “If you go to be with her at the hospital, we are
done!”

He said, “She is my daughter, and I am going.”

“I am going to divorce you!”

So after thirty-plus years of marriage, Johnny had had enough of the power struggle and took the first step toward taking control of his own life. He got in his car and drove to Charlotte.

Shortly after midnight on December 29
^th
, there was a knock on my door. All my lights were out. I looked outside and I couldn’t see a car. And then came a hammering on the front door. I screamed, “Yes?” My heart was pounding.

And then I heard, “It’s me. Open the door.”

I opened the door, and there he was, in an overcoat, white T-shirt, dark pants, and black tennis shoes, smiling. “Why aren’t you happy to see me?”

Yes, there he was, standing in the foyer, teasing me, as though nothing had ever happened between us.

Quinn almost jumped out of my arms to get to him.

It was so surprising to me that she knew exactly who he was and was so happy to see him, because so far in her life she had only spent about three hours with him, total. She looked at him in exactly the same way she did the first time he held her, the look she gives only to him.

“How’s my sweet girl?”

She beamed. She was so excited—actually, she needed to be sleeping. A married mom once said to me, “I can’t imagine having an infant with no help.” I replied that there are actually some real advantages: no arguments, no power struggles about how to do it, and no frustrations about the type of (opposite) help that comes from a dad. But then again, having a dad is having a dad, and nothing can take the place of that important relationship.