About John Edwards
Johnny Reid Edwards (born June 10, 1953) is an American lawyer and former politician who represented North Carolina in the United States Senate from 1999 to 2005. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the party's vice presidential nominee under Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. He also was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008. Edwards defeated the incumbent Republican Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina's 1998 Senate election. Toward the end of his six-year term, he declined to seek re-election, and instead sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2004 presidential election. Edwards suspended his campaign shortly after Super Tuesday, and later accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination. Following Kerry's loss to incumbent president George W. Bush, Edwards began working full-time at the One America Committee, a political action committee he established in 2001, and was appointed director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. He was also a consultant for Fortress Investment Group LLC. After his 2008 presidential campaign, Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 3, 2011, on six felony charges of violating multiple federal campaign contribution laws to cover up an extramarital affair to which he eventually admitted. He was found not guilty on one count, and the judge declared a mistrial on the remaining five charges, as the jury was unable to come to an agreement. The Justice Department dropped the remaining charges and did not attempt to retry Edwards. Though he was not convicted of any crime, the revelation that he had engaged in an extramarital affair and fathered a child while his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was dying of cancer, severely damaged his public image and effectively ended his political career. Since the death of Kay Hagan on October 28, 2019, Edwards is the only living former Democratic senator from North Carolina. A football star in high school, Edwards was the first person in his family to attend college. Nevertheless, Edwards won a $3.7 million verdict on behalf of his client, who had suffered permanent brain and nerve damage after a doctor prescribed an overdose of the anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse during alcohol aversion therapy. Mark Dayton, editor of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, would later call it "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen." The jury awarded the family $25 million, the largest personal injury award in North Carolina history.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.