ELIZABETH EDWARDS SPEAKS OUT ABOUT AFFAIR

Elizabeth Edwards says her husband John "made a terrible mistake" by having an affair, but coping with the revelation was "oddly made somewhat easier" by her battle with cancer.
"None of these (problems) has been easy," she writes on the political blog Daily Kos. "But we have stood with one another through them all. Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him."
Elizabeth, 59, says her husband, 55, told her about the affair two years ago – months before her breast cancer returned. "John made a terrible mistake in 2006," she writes. "The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007."
She says she wanted to keep it a "private matter" because it would be even more difficult to deal with on a public stage.
But, she adds, "Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private."
She encouraged people to watch her husband's ABC news interview Friday.
"Admitting one's mistakes is a hard thing for anyone to do, and I am proud of the courage John showed by his honesty in the face of shame," she writes. "The toll on our family of news helicopters over our house and reporters in our driveway is yet unknown. But now the truth is out, and the repair work that began in 2006 will continue."
She concludes with a plea for privacy, saying, "I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John's conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time."
•Reporting by SANDRA SOBIERAJ WESTFALL

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