Women's Voices for Change's Open Salon Blog

A Letter to Rielle Hunter

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:04:36 -0400

By Chris Lombardi

Dear Rielle,

I'm glad you went on "Oprah" this week. Ever since you burst onto the national consciousness in 2008, I've been wondering about you -- the former Lisa Druck, now a Southern Californian named Rielle, and since last year the mother of a lovely toddler who looks just like former senator and presidential contender John Edwards.

Back then, I had a pretty good idea of who you were, and, paradoxically, none at all. Here on the WVFC website, I wrote about what your story brought to mind: "We Could All Be Elizabeth Edwards." Like many women, I first heard the unfolding tale with that brilliant attorney and cancer survivor in mind, and felt sick. "We all could be Elizabeth: we all could see something we’ve fought for splintered in a second, because of others’ stupidity or our own. As midlife women, we curse what our bodies can no longer do or be or look like..." Or the fear that crosses the heart that someone newer and shinier can walk into your relationship and upend it.

It's been nearly two years. For a while you were easier to ignore, what with the tawdry details spilling out of all the political press or the memoir of former Edwards aide Andrew Young, who once claimed to be your child's father. As soon as Elizabeth finally filed for divorce, protecting her children, it was easy to decide you were none of my business.

So why turn to that hour with Oprah and your Hollywood-lovely face? Maybe because as much as I think I could have been Elizabeth, I also know I could have turned out more like you.

After all, you and I moved to California for love in 1991, though I went to San Francisco and you took up life in Beverly Hills with a new husband and a new name. I've also had the very experience you described to Oprah, about the day in 2006 when you met Edwards: for me it was an evening on a dance floor when "love at first sight" didn't feel like a cliche and it seemed fine to ignore common sense. (Thank heavens, in my case the dude involved melted away after a few weeks.) “Our hearts were louder than the minds,” you said. Right. Anyway there's a chemical name for that "wave of energy" you felt: oxytocin, the hormone that helps babies nurse and people newly in love forget to wash their hair.

Not that there was anything wrong with your hair today. You looked like a starlet, with the same flat smile. But the way you talked reminds me of some people I knew out West, who regarded appointments as fiction, jobs as encumbrances, and promises as suggestions. Like the guy who enticed a dear friend of mine to sell everything and move to San Jose so they could start a business together — then announced that he had a bad breakup and a twisted ankle and "wasn't in a space to work right now." Your jargon reminds me of the self-help pseudo-spiritual cults everywhere out there, whose members kept inviting me into "informational sessions" so I could learn about things like "the reality-tone scale."

Some of these people were friends of mine, dance partners, lovers. Like you, they saw "seeking the truth" not as a task but a treat: "I was supporting him in his process, and his intentions never wavered. I knew that he wanted — he just had a really unique way of getting there — to live a life of truth," you said of Edwards, with that blissed-out smile.

And this is the point where I realize: Nah, I don't have to worry about turning into you. I've broken up with the likes of you.

So has Jenny Sanford, former first lady of South Carolina, who was on "The View" the day you appeared on "Oprah." Her comment about your declaration that "I'm not a home wrecker," was a sad laugh with a flash of anger: Commenting on you and her ex-husband's Argentinian mistress, she said, "They weren't 18 years old. They knew exactly what they were doing." The other women at "The View" agreed, uniting for once before the incomprehensible.

But I don't think what any of us say is going to make a difference. You believe that your profound spiritual connection to John Edwards is something no one else can understand. This can't really be a letter to you, not even one of those open letters we write to politicians. Because you've evolved to a place where your ears cannot hear what we're saying.

You and John Edwards -- who I'm embarrassed to admit I once voted for -- have been reminding me of that line from The Great Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." In your case, those 'other people' include Elizabeth; your baby daughter, Frances Quinn; and Cate, Jack and Emma Claire Edwards, now set to grow up a bike-ride away from you and the baby.

For a while, the clean-up crew included the rest of America. Knowing that, you went on "Oprah" to overcome the "false picture" that all those years of press reports had brought. But I think you did the opposite. "It was compelling TV, but in the end, Hunter didn't seem any more understandable than when The National Enquirer first discovered her," said TIME Magazine. Salon writer Rebecca Traister wrote: "While I understand love and desire to be viciously complicated things, and certainly do not believe all mistresses to be craven, self-absorbed or ill-intentioned, I believe Rielle Hunter to be all of those things." And you know you're in trouble when the New York Times' TV reporter compares your unblinking certainty to that of Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Your destructive capacity is narrower now than in 2006, but it's still hard to watch.

Thank you, Rielle Jaya James Druck, for reminding us of who's behind those wide eyes.

Now, I think, America can finally quit you.

(First published at Women's Voices For Change.org.)

Rielle Hunter, who told Oprah Winfrey in a program broadcast on Thursday that John Edwards had a secret affair with her because “he wanted to live a life of truth

Vitamin D: Clearing Up the Confusion

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:03:05 -0400

by Keri Gans

As a registered dietician, one of the questions I routinely ask my patients on their initial consultations is: “Do you know your vitamin D status?”

Why, you may ask yourself, does this matter? Over the last couple of years, vitamin D has come out of the closet, leaping to the forefront of many nutrition discussions. You might even say it’s the vitamin du jour. It has always been associated with bone strength, of course, but recently it’s been connected with so many health conditions it could make your head spin.

Current research has linked vitamin D shortages to heart disease (today's headline), certain cancers (see above), diabetes, obesity, depression, and multiple sclerosis. The problem, though, is that the outcome of various research studies differ, and there’s still no overall consensus on what vitamin D does and doesn’t do. What do I need to know? The first thing I recommend to patients is to get their vitamin D levels checked. Ask your doctor to test for 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Blood levels of less than 30 nanograms per milliliter are considered deficient, but many experts agree that a level of 50 nanograms per milliliter is ideal.

How do I get enough D? As you might imagine, I always like to recommend food first. Foods that contain vitamin D include fatty fish (like salmon, tuna, or mackerel), liver, and egg yolks, and vitamin D-fortified milk. But in all honesty, it’s hard to meet your daily needs with food alone. As for the sun, yes, it does convert a cholesterol substance found in the skin into vitamin D. But baking in the sun, especially without sunscreen (which is the way you’d need to do it) adds a whole new host of problems—wrinkles and possible skin cancer among them. And as you get older, your body absorbs less vitamin D from this exposure.

To read the rest, click here.

Oscars 2010: The Year of the Over-40 Woman?

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:02:25 -0500

The nominations have been announced and analyzed, and the awards-night hysteria has yet to shift into overdrive. Which makes this a great moment to salute this year’s over-40 female Oscar contenders.

By now, everyone not living on Neptune knows that there’s a woman—a beautiful, 58-year-old woman—in the race for Best Director. And, in a delicious burst of irony, that she’s squaring off against her ex. It’s a plot line straight out of the classic Oscar playbook—critically acclaimed movie underdog going toe to toe against the high-grossing, critically acclaimed, and in this case technologically groundbreaking front-runner, with the marital back-story amping the frisson.

On Oscar night, Kathryn Bigelow might just end up brushing past James Cameron on her way to collect a Best Director award for The Hurt Locker, leaving him to console himself with Avatar’s stratospheric global box-office take. It could happen. And there are plenty of people—including a number of Academy voters—who hope it does. But let’s get real. In the history of the Oscars, Bigelow is only the fourth woman to earn a Best Director nomination, and her predecessors all went home empty-handed. (The last was Sofia Coppola in 2004 for Lost in Translation.) Still, this year’s doubling of the Best Picture pool from five nominees to ten yielded two films directed by women, both in their 50s—Bigelow’s Hurt Locker and An Education by Danish director Lone Scherfig—an Academy Awards first.

It's not a bad Oscar year for acting, either. Three of the five Best Actress nominees—Sandra Bullock, Helen Mirren, and Meryl Streep—are 45 or older, and one of them could easily win. The same goes for Mo’Nique, who’s widely thought to have a lock on Best Supporting Actress.

To read the rest, with lots of video, click here.

Heart attacks: what you need to know

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:02:05 -0500

Mark Sanchez scored points in last week’s Super Bowl broadcast—not for playing, but for a public service announcement about women and heart attacks. It’s an important message, but a 20-second spot didn’t leave much time for details (like actual symptoms, for instance). We asked cardiologist Holly S. Andersen, M.D. of the WVFC medical advisory board to spell out exactly what women need to know. — Ed.

Heart disease is the number-one cause of death for both men and women in the US. It kills more every year than all cancers combined—and the next six causes of death combined. Since 1984, more women than men have died from heart disease in this country every year. And once a woman is diagnosed with heart disease, she’ll do worse and will more likely die from it than a man will.

In the US today, a woman having a heart attack will typically wait longer before presenting to an emergency room. She’ll be less likely to have the classic symptom of crushing chest pain, and will be less likely to receive a diagnostic electrocardiogram. Not surprisingly, she’ll be less likely to be diagnosed correctly. Even if she is, she’ll be less likely to receive all the life-saving therapies we now have to treat heart attacks. It gets worse. Even if the decision is made to give her these therapies, they will be given, on average, at a 13-minute time delay compared to a man.

Those of us who treat heart attacks have a saying: “Time is muscle.” And even if you control for all of these variables (getting the electrocardiogram, the correct diagnosis, and lifesaving therapies without the 13-minute time lag), a woman is still more likely to die from her heart attack than a man. The greatest discrepancy in survival rates—in other words, the highest death rate compared to men in the same age group—is among women ages 35-50. And we don’t know why.'

To read the rest of Dr. Andersen's advice, click here.

CBS Wins Hearts With Sanchez Superbowl PSA

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:02:39 -0500

by Patricia Yarberry Allen

Advertisers and the companies that hire them, take note: There’s data showing that more women are watching the Super Bowl than men—and the women are much more interested in the ads. (This news comes from the Harris Interactive poll done for Hanon Mckendry and Mindscape in 2010.)

CBS—obviously aware of this fact—cleverly chose to do a public service announcement about heart health for women. It was certainly in the sweet spot for the Women’s Voices for Change reader demographic. Especially since they chose Mark Sanchez to deliver the message.

Continue reading at Women's Voices For Change.