GQ Responds to Rielle Hunter's Sexy Photo Spread

John Edwards' mistress was repulsed by the sight of the GQ photos.

ByABC News via logo
March 15, 2010, 7:44 AM

March 16, 2010 — -- John Edwards' mistress Rielle Hunter said that she thought the photo spread in GQ would include headshots and not just sexy, body-baring photos.

"Rielle is a smart woman. She knows what she wore and what she was doing in the photo shoot," said GQ reporter Lisa DePaulo.

Hunter, a one-time videographer for Edwards' presidential campaign, posed for the pictures wearing only a man's button down white shirt, a string of pearls and panties. In some of the photos she is posed on a bed with stuffed animals piled around her. Her panties are peeking out in one frame.

A teary Hunter told ABC News' Barbara Walters she was repulsed by the sight of the sexy photos and thought all but one would be headshots, Walters said.

But GQ released a video of the shoot to "GMA" today and at one point the videographer asks Hunter, "You want to take a look at this?"

Despite the provocative nature of the photos and her comments in the interview, Edwards has so far remained silent.

Click here to read the full GQ interview.

In the interview, Hunter's first since her scandalous affair with Edwards exploded on headlines around the world in 2008, she said she believes her relationship with the former presidential candidate may be just beginning.

"We do love each other very much," Rielle Hunter told GQ magazine. "And that hasn't changed, and I believe that will be till death do us part. The love doesn't go away."

But former Edwards aide Andrew Young, who had at one time claimed paternity of the couple's love child, told ABCNews.com Monday that the interview with GQ only served to show the world that she has tapped into a well-paid "army of lawyers."

"I think all of us, we're all trying to find a way of reaching peace with what we've done," he said, before calling some of Hunter's claims in the article "ridiculous."

The public has skewered the former senator for cheating on his cancer-stricken wife and then denying his mistress' child, but Hunter insists he is the epitome of truthfulness and humility.

"Everyone talks about how Johnny has fallen from grace," Hunter, 45, told the magazine. "In reality, he's fallen to grace."