How The Enquirer Nailed John Edwards

From David Perel, former Editor-In-Chief:

It took two years, thousands of man hours and a cross-country chase to catch John Edwards cheating.

That was the easy part.

Even after gathering and publishing overwhelming proof that the man who wanted to restore America to the moral high ground as president had fathered a love child while his wife battled terminal cancer, the more difficult task proved to be getting anyone to believe it.

As Editor-in-Chief of the National Enquirer I devoted unprecedented resources to the Edwards story while supervising a large team of reporters and editors whose ultimate goal was simply to sell newspapers while exposing a hypocrite (not win a Pulitzer, although, hey, that would have been fun, if only to observe the whoopee-cushion effect it would have had on so many journalists).

While much has been written about the Enquirer's scoop, the key element of how Edwards was caught has never been told -- until now. The untold story (to borrow one of the Enquirer's famous catch phrases) is that it took the perfect meshing of technology and psychology to rip the Edwards-affixed label of "tabloid trash" off the mass-ignored expose and force him into a confession.

The Enquirer had spent weeks shadowing Edwards' Falstaffian aide Andrew Young and Rielle Hunter in a North Carolina gated community before finally publishing the story that she was pregnant with the candidate's baby. But when Young astoundingly claimed paternity of Hunter's baby the story hit with a thud.

Read more here.

David Perel was the Editor-in-Chief of the National Enquirer during the John Edwards investigation and went on to re-launch RadarOnline.com, where he is now executive vice president and managing editor.