Cape & Islands News

Osterville oil-i-garth, Bunny Mellon, financed Edwards love child

TODAY's quote: "She's upset that the whole thing has come to this particular moment. She is standing by Senator Edwards but is sorry that the government has pursued these charges against him.She did not understand why anyone cared." -  Bryan Huffman, a decorator from Monroe, N.C., who was the conduit for Mrs. Mellon's checks to Mr. Edwards.

Osterville heiress makes Edwards headlines again
Listerine heiress wakes up with a bad taste in her mouth - again

Bunny's grandfather invented Listerine and her father was president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company.

The New York Sunday Times is all over John Edwards and Bunny Mellon.

The newspaper's headlines screams "Edwards Case Casts Spotlight on a Long Reclusive Donor" reminding us that political chicanery knows no party bounds, and a sanctimonious Democrat like Edwards is giving "family values" a bad name with some help from a woman who also paid big money to stop the Cape wind farm in front of her Osterville estate.

On Friday John Edwards was indicted on charges that he illegally used $725,000 given to him secretly by Rachel "Bunny" Mellon of Osterville to finance and then hide his mistress during the height of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Although she was not named in the indictment - she was referred to as "Person C" - but is essentially an un-indicted co-conspirator according to the newspaper.

Mrs. Mellon could not be reached for comment. But Bryan Huffman, a decorator from Monroe, N.C., who was the conduit for Mrs. Mellon's checks to Mr. Edwards, said he spoke to her on Friday after the indictment.

"Bunny's" help to tainted Democrats was limited to Edwards. She was richly involved in the seasonal trophy home-owner's efforts to stop America's first offshore wind farm for his friend Tedd Kennedy. 

After all, Didn't she redecorate the White House for his brother jack?

Read the Times story here.

You read it all here first:
The woman who called Cape Wind's lawyer "A traitor to his class"

Bad breath or bad taste?
Poor little "Bunny" Mellon was all over the tube last night.
   Bunny Mellon is the eldest child of Gerard Barnes Lambert, a founder of Warner-Lambert (now part of Pfizer) whose claim to fame was marketing his father's invention of Listerine by making bad breath a social disgrace.

A s we reported here in January 2010, a few weeks before former presidential candidate John Edwards came clean to the world about fathering an out-of-wedlock child with his campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, he made a special visit to see Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon at her estate in Virginia (She also has a home in Osterville).

Mellon, the then 99-year-old widow of the philanthropist and banking heir Paul Mellon, had been one of the biggest donors to Edwards' presidential campaign. Along with the late Fred Baron, Edwards' longtime friend and finance chairman who died of cancer last year, "Bunny" Mellon, as her friends call her, also provided money which was used to resettle Edwards' mistress in California and pay her bills, according to Andrew Young, the former Edwards aide who once claimed to be the father of Hunter's baby. Young has since recanted the paternity story and has written a tell-all book about the scandal... Muckety.

How Edwards used wealthy heiress to fund love-child cover-up

A matter of class?
According to page 30 in Wendy Williams book, "Cape Wind", at an Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound event at Osterville's Wianno Club four years ago "heiress "Bunny" Mellon accosted Cape Wind's lawyer, John Sherman, and said, "You're a traitor to your class."

Payments from a wealthy heiress to the Mellon fortune through a Monroe, N.C., interior decorator helped subsidize the cover-up of John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter.

The decorator, Bryan Huffman, eventually became the conduit for as much as $700,000 from Rachel "Bunny" Mellon - what the Edwards camp called "Bunny money" - to help cover the expenses of Rielle Hunter and Andrew Young, the aide who claimed to be the father of her baby.

Mellon's money was part of more than $1.5 million that Young told ABC News was used for the cover-up. He said the money paid for a coast-to-coast odyssey that included trips on private jets, expensive lodging and even a BMW for Hunter.

Bunny makes ABC's 20/20

Some of the money, he said, also came in cash from the late Fred Baron, a Texas lawyer and Edwards' friend. The arrangement was necessary because John Edwards, a multi-millionaire, couldn't access his own bank accounts without alerting his wife, Elizabeth... Miami Herald.