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CHAPEL HILL During John Edwards' campaigns for president, Andrew Aldridge Young was a trusted, loyal aide, often near the Democrat's side when he was in North Carolina.
When Edwards and his family were out of town, Young looked after their houses. When they flew home, Young picked them up at the airport. If Edwards' parents needed help at a campaign event, Young was there.
And when Rielle Hunter – the campaign videographer with whom Edwards has acknowledged having an affair – became pregnant, Young said the baby was his.
That statement, posted by a Washington lawyer representing Young, transformed and complicated the life of a 42-year-old man who finished law school at Wake Forest but apparently has never practiced law. He has lived in Governors Club near Chapel Hill with his wife and three children, and more recently in a Santa Barbara, Calif., home worth nearly $2 million, both gated communities that shielded him from public view.
Records show that Young is wrapping up work on a 5,300-square-foot home on a wooded, 10-acre lot outside Chapel Hill, but it's not clear whether he is working. The National Enquirer, which first revealed Edwards' affair, reports that Young received $20,000 a month as part of a scheme to cover up the affair.
The circumstances have raised questions about Edwards' longtime aide, most sounding more like the stuff of soap operas than the residue of a failed campaign:
Was Young really the father of Hunter's newborn daughter? How did a man who collected a middle-class income raising money and serving as a personal assistant wind up doing so well for himself? Why did Edwards' campaign finance chairman pay to move Young and Hunter from North Carolina to exclusive neighborhoods in California, away from prying tabloid reporters?
Last month, Edwards' acknowledged that he had an extramarital affair with Hunter, but denied that he was the father of the baby girl she gave birth to in February. Edwards also denied any knowledge of payments made to Hunter and Young.
But news stories and blog postings have fueled skepticism about those assertions – and about Young's role.
Pigeon O'Brien, a Texas-based publicist and longtime friend of Hunter's before losing touch with her in June, said she remembers Hunter talking about her boyfriend “John” from North Carolina. But she cannot recall Hunter ever mentioning Andrew Young.
When the Enquirer's pursuit of the affair heated up last year, the Youngs and Hunter fell under the protection of Fred Baron, the Edwards campaign's finance chairman. An influential fundraiser for the Democratic Party, the former Dallas trial lawyer acknowledged last month that he paid to move Young and Hunter from North Carolina to California.
At one point after the move, according to Baron, Young's family was sharing a home with the pregnant Hunter, at least until tensions arose.
Young's new home in Chapel Hill is in a secluded spot – a place where he and his family may be able to dodge the persistent questions surrounding Edwards' relationship with Hunter, the woman hired to shoot videos leading up to his run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
Young and his family aren't talking to the press. But in a mid-August interview with the New York Post, Young's mother, Jacquelyn Juchatz, expressed doubts that her son was the father.
No father was listed on the baby's birth certificate. Timothy Toben, the Chapel Hill developer of the Youngs' new home and an Edwards campaign contributor who considers the Youngs friends, said the last year has been “horribly difficult” for them.
“They've been through a tough time, but they're survivors,” he said. “They're solid people, and I'm sure that they'll rebound.”
Getting close to power
Public records and interviews shed some light on Young's journey to the center of the Edwards maelstrom.
As a young man, he had trouble with the law. In 1987, at the age of 20, he was charged with burglary in Florida, but was never prosecuted. Two years later, he pleaded guilty to a worthless check charge.
Despite that, he went on to graduate from UNC Chapel Hill in 1992 (at age 26), later got his law degree and worked as a lobbyist for the N.C. Academy of Trial Lawyers. In 1999, he married Cheri Pfister, a registered nurse.
Young's relationship with Edwards dates to 1998, when he started as a low-level staffer for the wealthy trial lawyer's Senate campaign. One of his duties was scouting locations for a campaign office.
Gary Pearce, a Democratic operative and consultant to Edwards' Senate bid, remembered Young as an ambitious guy who wanted to be “involved with a big political figure.” Later, when Edwards made his run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, Young “bugged the hell out of me to make a contribution, as good fundraisers do,” Pearce said.
“My impression was that Andrew quickly got pretty close to John and Elizabeth Edwards,” Pearce said.
By 2002, Young was splitting his time working in Edwards' Senate office and with New American Optimists, a political-action committee affiliated with Edwards. A year later, Young was director of operations for the exploratory committee for Edwards' 2004 presidential run.
In March 2005, Young took a $70,000-a-year position raising funds at the UNC Law School's new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which tapped Edwards as its first director. The center was, among other things, a vehicle for Edwards to maintain a public profile after he left the Senate.
Young's salary was paid with private funds, a UNC Law School spokeswoman said. E-mails from that tenure show Young's playful side. In a March 2006 message to Mary Murray, then the law school's dean for external relations, Young asked how to handle a seminar sponsor's request to donate $10,000 in stocks for tax reasons.
“How does I dooooo that? Yipppeeeee,” Young wrote.
Moving up
While he was working for Edwards, Young and his wife started moving into a succession of larger homes.
In 1998, his mother helped him buy a home in Cary for $175,000. Records do not indicate how much money Juchatz contributed.
In 2000, the Youngs sold the Cary home and bought a house beside Lake Wheeler in Raleigh for $450,000. The next year, they added a family room and other improvements valued at $200,000, building permits show.
Over the next few years, Wake County records show that the Youngs took out lines of credit and a variety of loans on the Raleigh house – one as high as $435,000.
In Feb. 2007, the Youngs sold that house for $1.2 million. The sale price was about $750,000 more than they paid for the home in July 2000, and about $300,000 more than its current tax value. Records show the buyer was not an Edwards campaign contributor. In September 2005, the Youngs bought a 10-acre tract in the Conservation Ridge project near Chapel Hill for $300,000. Orange County records show that he, his mother and his wife borrowed about $272,700 in that transaction.
In October 2007, the month the Enquirer published its first story about Edwards' affair, the Youngs borrowed $850,000, apparently to build the new home on the Conservation Ridge property. Toben, the Conservation Ridge developer, said the Youngs weren't given a discount because of their relationship with Edwards.
Neighboring 10-acre lots sold for between $270,000 and $360,000.
“We had the land on the market for six months, and I know that they were looking to move to Chapel Hill because they were working with the Edwards campaign and their previous home was some distance away,” Toben said. “I remember him saying he did well on his previous home, but I don't know that he was going to apply (all that money) to his new house.”
Helped, but how much?
In July 2006, the Edwards campaign hired Hunter to produce a series of videos of the candidate to post online.
In September 2006, Raleigh police cited Young for having open beer containers at a park near his home. He was later charged with driving while impaired. A substance abuse counselor found “some evidence of alcohol abuse” and recommended group counseling, according to court records.
University records indicate that Young resigned from the UNC Center in December 2006, the same month Edwards declared his second run at the Democratic presidential nomination.
In 2007, the Edwards campaign paid Young about $6,000 to $7,000 a month. His earnings that year, after drawing his last paycheck from the campaign in November, totaled about $74,000.
Early this year, with Fred Baron's help, the Youngs moved to California.
Baron hasn't said how much he paid Young. He has said he made the decision to help the two on his own, without informing Edwards.
Young and his relatives have declined repeated requests for interviews in recent months.
In the fledgling development where the Youngs' new home is nearing completion, a long, winding road leads past horse stables and a duck pond. For the couple of homes going up on Thomas Berry Way, “Private Drive” and “No Trespassing” signs dot the clay and gravel roads.
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