What Really Happened (34 page)

Playtime at Johnny’s house is never-ending—from the playhouse, to the trampoline, to the basketball court, to the pool . . . etc.

He left, and my cell rang. It was Johnny. I walked upstairs as I picked up. “I take it there was no deal.” As I was talking to him, I heard loud aggressive banging on my front door. I looked down from the upstairs window and saw the top of a curly head of hair. “I’ve got Jim Morrill knocking on my door. Right now. He’s pounding away like he owns the place.” How scary is it that I can identify Jim Morrill, a political reporter from the
Charlotte Observer
whom I have never met, by spotting the top of his head?

“I’ve got helicopters circling my house,” Johnny said.

“So I take it there is an indictment. At least that’s what they’re reporting on the news.”

“Yeah, wait till you hear what they wanted. A deal just wasn’t going to happen.”

“As you know, I’m happy about that.”

“It has been moved to the middle district. I have to drive to Winston-Salem.”

“Why has it been moved?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to get dressed and go.”

“Okay,” I said. “I love you. And hold your head high.”

Had I even thought for a second that he would be having a mug shot taken, I would have said, “And don’t forget, no matter what they say to you, the media will get a hold of your mug shot, so don’t smile in it, because they don’t know yet that you aren’t guilty.” The same way he should have said to me, given the interview was in
GQ
, “No matter what they say to you, how covered you actually are, make sure you wear pants.” Word to the wise: PR people matter.

I hung up and called Allison Van Laningham to tell her that they moved the hearing to the middle district, her neighborhood. My other lawyer beeped in. I told Allison that I needed to take the call; it was Mike Critchley, my criminal lawyer. Mike reminded me not to say a word and to refer all media to him. I said, “No worries there,” and told him that I had already told Rosemarie Terenzio, my publicist, to refer all calls to him. I called Allison back. She had the indictment and sent it to me. I read it immediately and couldn’t believe it! I was floored, happy, and outraged all at the same time. I really thought, after all this time, that they had to have
something
. I didn’t know what they could possibly have but I thought that after two-and-a-half years and millions of taxpayer dollars, they had to have
something
. But it seems like the whole case is hinged on Andrew Young’s statements.

Maybe when it’s all said and done Andrew could pitch Mastercard for his own commercial: Used BMW for the boss’s mistress: $28,000. Rental house for her: $2,700 a month. OB/GYN bills: $2,500. Filling the house with furniture from Pottery Barn: $30,000. Using the boss’s mistress as your cover and lying to everyone about the money you solicited using his name but kept for yourself: Priceless.

One evening in July Johnny called and said, “We have to have a hard conversation.”

Graduation from her trike! On the indoor playground, 2011.

“Okay,” I said, bracing myself. The physical tensing was because of the damage that’s happened over the past few years. Before this all happened, my natural reaction would have been to relax, let go on the inside, and breathe—not to tense up. That’s what damage does, among other things.

Johnny went on to tell me that the three women he had told me about the first night I had met him were, in fact, not real and that he had made them up.

I thought he was joking. “Oh, come on.”

“I’m serious.”

“What?” I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“I made them up. They aren’t real.”

My mind was racing. How could that be? He had told me detail upon detail. I remembered the ups and downs of emotion I had felt the night he went to Chicago to break off his relationship there. I had experienced anger like no other. My reality within our relationship had just been ripped out from under me.

Something I said on
Oprah
suddenly flashed in my head. She had asked, “How do you know he isn’t lying to you?”

I replied, “He doesn’t lie to me. I know him like the back of my hand.”

So I asked him straight out, “Why would you do that?”

He went on to tell me that it was a habit triggered by women when they hit on him. Apparently one that started decades ago when his first mistress expressed her plans to leave her husband for him. He didn’t want her to think that she was the only one or that he was ever going to leave Elizabeth. He wanted to keep control over the situation, keep her at bay, and his real feelings as well, I imagine.

“So who was real and who wasn’t?”

“The three I told you about the first night, the ones after 2004, were fiction. The ones before 2004 are real.”

Well, no wonder the media never found ex-mistresses in Chicago, LA, or Florida. They didn’t exist.

“So if Chicago wasn’t real, who owned the cell phone before the one I bought you?”

“My second ex-mistress.”

I thought about all the texts that I had read—they were all from her.

“But why would you—on the first night—tell me about three women like that, right off the bat?”

“I didn’t want you to think that you were special.”

My mind was still spinning, thinking of all the things I would have done differently had I known this little tidbit of total fucking insanity! Excuse the judgment, but shit! I was mad at myself!

“So here I was, thinking when you ran that you have so many smoking bombs since 2004, but I was the only one?”

“Yes. You are the only one.”

“And why did you wait so long to tell me this?”

“I wanted to tell you in 2009, but Cooney told me not to tell you before you testified before the grand jury.”

“So you waited until 2011?!”

I continued, “And let me just say, you following Jim Cooney’s ‘brilliant’ advice has done us no favors as far as our relationship is concerned. First, he instructs you not to talk to me for five months after I testified, and now this?”

I started asking details about what was and wasn’t real. He immediately went into reaction mode, and I realized that I was interrogating him the way Elizabeth did for years.

So I stopped.

“Yeah, I don’t know where this is going to leave us.”

He simply said, “You’ll adjust.”

We hung up. I sat still. Fucking unbelievable. I, too, had betrayed myself. After a couple of minutes of beating myself up with mean thoughts followed by awful feelings, in my head I let go of everything that I knew to be real and true and just sat there. The mind likes to hold on to thoughts, attach and file thoughts to a category called “What I know.” This gives us a (false) sense of security and pride. And now my mind had nothing to hang its hat on as far as my relationship with Johnny was concerned.

Johnny didn’t do anything out of character. He has a long history of lying about one thing only—women—and I mistakenly thought I was different. I was in love with him and wanted to be special. I wanted to be the only one he didn’t lie to. But I had one problem: I was a woman.

Stupid me.

I really don’t believe Johnny’s lying about women was ever malicious. It’s actually very understandable behavior from a passive-aggressive man. One that never learned how to express his feelings and how to stand up for himself. Just like many children who learn how to use lying as a tool to get what they want, he used it as a defense to keep women, intimacy, and real feelings at bay and get what
he
wanted. Interestingly enough, unconscious passive-aggressive men are also frequently partnered with an aggressive witch on wheels, allowing themselves to be the passive good guy, the victim of all the madness directed at them. In reality, the pattern keeps them from taking responsibility for their own feelings and standing up for what they feel.

I misjudged. You don’t actually trust other people—you trust your judgment of them. It all takes place inside of you, and when your judgment is wrong, it’s you that can’t see clearly. The anger and sadness you experience is at yourself for not seeing clearly. But you must forgive yourself because, believe it or not, when you truly forgive yourself, you will be able to see real gifts in what happened. And even though Johnny is who he is, I don’t want to label him and lock him into an image that he may no longer fit. Johnny is a very different person today than he was when we met on February 21
^st
, 2006. I actually don’t ever want to label anyone, even Andrew or Cheri, because labeling stops understanding. When you label people, you can no longer relate to them or understand them.

In the end, we are all human and we will all betray ourselves from time to time. We all have agendas and, God willing, we will all fall in love.

I fell in love. I followed my heart and I don’t regret it. I cannot regret it because I learned a lot; in fact, I grew up. Our relationship and all its consequences helped me to evolve—I am a different person. But more importantly, as any mother knows, I cannot regret our love because it produced the greatest love in my entire life: Frances Quinn.

Johnny does know me well. Just as he said I would, I adjusted.

The government has this argument that Johnny was hiding me in order to influence the election. I don’t agree with that at all because Johnny hid me for the last two years and he wasn’t running for anything. His defense argues that he was hiding me from Elizabeth, but even after she passed away, he was still hiding me.

My Quinn in the hat—at home in Charlotte.

I would say that he was hiding me because he was still unable to stand up for his feelings and because his desire to protect his family from emotional pain outweighs his need to be honest about how he truly feels.

Way back when Johnny and Elizabeth separated (it feels like a lifetime ago), he and I automatically, naturally, just went right back together. And to my surprise, I discovered that there were parts of my personality, parts of my good nature, that had shut down and did not seem to be coming back into our relationship. It’s like a slice of pure innocence—my youthful, blissful self—went into hiding when Andrew claimed paternity and even more so when Johnny publicly denied our love. Of course, the biggest part of me left “us” when he denied Quinn was his daughter.