While we're on the subject, another sexual idiot

Katharine Seelye and Kim Severson have an article in The New York Times about John Edwards and his family:

In a display of loyalty that surprised many outsiders, Cate Edwards walked into a North Carolina federal courthouse last week with her father, John Edwards, the former senator and presidential candidate who had cheated on her mother and shattered his career and their family. But those in the Edwards inner circle knew that Cate, 29, was stepping into a familiar role, one that she has filled for half of her young life.
The night before the court appearance, Ms. Edwards, a lawyer like Mr. Edwards and her mother, Elizabeth, was at her father’s side as he planned his legal strategy with his defense team at their home near Chapel Hill. She and her father had just returned from her little brother’s baseball game.
“She’s a sounding board for John,” said a person familiar with the meeting that night.
“Cate sticks with her dad,” said Glenn Bergenfield, a close friend of the family who introduced Elizabeth to John when they were all in law school together and is godfather to their young son. “Despite all the things that have happened, she wants her father to succeed and her family to stay together,” Mr. Bergenfield said. “It’s not any more complicated than that.”
At the courthouse, Ms. Edwards, a graduate of Harvard Law School, appeared composed. She has come by her strength the hard way, having coped with more than her share of pain, much of it on the public stage. Fifteen years ago, when she was barely a teenager, her sixteen-year-old brother, Wade, was thrown from a car and killed on his way to the family beach house. For two years, her mother later wrote, Cate slept on two chairs pushed together in her parents’ room, but she emerged as the glue that would hold the family together.
That experience laid the foundation for her to face the cascade of crises that would follow: her father’s political losses, the revelations that he had an affair and a child with his campaign videographer while he was running for president in 2008, her mother’s public and prolonged battle with breast cancer, and then in December, her mother’s death.
“It’s very, very hard to imagine how you would cope when you haven’t faced tragedy,” Ms. Edwards told Harper’s Bazaar in 2007, after her mother’s cancer recurred. “But the strength exists, and you do get through it,” she said. “Having been through Wade’s death is the only way I know I can move on from this kind of emotional hardship.”
On a cold rainy Saturday in December of 2010, in front of nearly a thousand people, Ms. Edwards delivered her mother’s eulogy. “One thing remains true and will never change, which is that we’re still a family,” she said. She was the executor of her mother’s will, and with that came the mantle of family guardian.
Last week, it fell to her to drive with her father to court in Winston-Salem and face the cameras with him, after he pleaded not guilty to felony charges related to his long-secret affair.
No one will ever know if Elizabeth Edwards, who was estranged from her husband but had reconciled with him to some degree before she died, would have stood with him; his defense, after all, is based on his effort to keep the affair secret from his wife. But Elizabeth Edwards made it clear before she died, friends said, that she wanted her family to support him as a father and that Cate Edwards should do what she could to keep the family together.
“She said that Cate should never feel like she is betraying her mother’s memory,” said a friend of Elizabeth’s who could be called as a witness and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Watching the courthouse scene on television was hard for Mr. Bergenfield. “It brought tears to my eyes, the whole perp walk,” he said. But, he added, “Cate has been through harder times than even this with her father, and there was no doubt about what she was going to do.”
Friends say that she has slowly but deliberately established herself as her own person. She is an associate at Sanford Wittels & Heisler in Washington. Her passion is to end racial and gender discrimination; she has supported same-sex marriage (a disagreement with her father). She has been planning her fall wedding to Trevor Upham, a medical resident whom she met when they were students at Princeton, and who served as a pallbearer at her mother’s funeral. And she travels home regularly to the family compound.
People who watched Cate grow up in the Raleigh area had no doubt that the girl who looked like her mother but was much like her father would be an interesting blend of them both. Although she is not as charismatic as John nor as talkative as her mother, they say, she is funny, centered, and savvy.
Friends expect Ms. Edwards to continue to help Mr. Edwards through his likely trial, and help bring up her siblings, Jack, eleven, and Emma Claire, thirteen.
“She is a very steady presence,” said a person familiar with the legal discussions. “Obviously they’ve been through a lot, but their lives are focused on moving forward.”