Top 10 Political Sex Scandals

Scandal: Affair with a former campaign videographer
How Outed: The National Enquirer

After months of denying the allegations, the onetime Vice Presidential candidate confessed on Aug. 8, 2008 to having had an affair with a 42-year-old aspiring actress turned political documentarian named Rielle Hunter, whom Edwards' staff had hired to make videos for his campaign. In a plot twist fit for a Jerry Springer episode, Edwards, whose wife Elizabeth had been diagnosed in Nov. 2004 with incurable breast cancer, vehemently denied fathering Hunter's child, as had been alleged in the Enquirer report, and offered to take a paternity test.

In an interview with ABC News Nightline, Edwards chalked up the affair to a "self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism" inevitably spawned by his becoming a leading national political figure (and perhaps by his receiving a nod as People Magazine's "Sexiest Politician" in 2000). In May, Elizabeth appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss her memoir Resilience. In the book she does not once mention the name of her husband's mistress, instead referring to her as "that woman" or "the female videographer." The same week Hunter — after initially saying no — agreed to allow a DNA test to prove whether John fathered her daughter. No test has yet been conducted.

See the screwups of Campaign '08.