Mr. Edwards emphatically denied being the father, saying that his relationship with Ms. Hunter ended long before the pregnancy that resulted in Ms. Hunter’s giving birth on Feb. 27.  “I know that it’s not possible that this child could be mine because of the timing of events,” Mr. Edwards told Bob Woodruff of ABC News on Friday, adding that he would be “happy to take a paternity test and would love to see it happen.”  In a statement he issued Friday, Mr. Edwards said that another man was “the apparent father.” Although he did not identify the man, a lawyer for Andrew A. Young, a longtime but little-known Edwards confidant, said his client was the father.  Mr. Young was described by acquaintances as an unassuming family man from North Carolina who developed a deep loyalty to Mr. Edwards over the years.  The Charlotte Observer, however, has reported that no father is listed on the child’s birth certificate.  Late last year, amid reports in The National Enquirer that Mr. Edwards was the father of Ms. Hunter’s child, Mr. Young, 44, suddenly surfaced and issued the statement that the baby was his. He abruptly quit his position with Mr. Edwards and, with financial help from a wealthy Edwards supporter, Fred Baron, packed up his family and went into hiding.  Mr. Baron, a Texas lawyer who spearheaded fund-raising for Mr. Edwards’s vice-presidential campaign in 2004 and his presidential bid in 2008, said Saturday that he decided to help Mr. Young and Ms. Hunter leave the state because they were being hounded by tabloid reporters and photographers. He did not tell Mr. Edwards what he was doing, he said, nor did Mr. Edwards ask him to help.  Mr. Baron also said that he did not use any campaign money to relocate Mr. Young and Ms. Hunter. “All funds were from my personal account,” he said.  On Saturday, people who know Mr. Edwards and Mr. Young expressed shock at the turn of events, and several described a deep relationship between the two men. In the acknowledgments for his 2003 book, “Four Trials,” Mr. Edwards included Mr. Young and his wife, Cheri, in a select group whose friendship, he said, “cannot be put into words, but each knows his or her importance in my family’s life.”  In the case of Mr. Young, that importance was easily overlooked because he would recede into the background, according to several acquaintances.  Burton Craige, a lawyer who collaborated on dozens of cases with Mr. Edwards, said Mr. Young maintained a low profile when he worked in fund-raising and development for the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers in the late 1990s.  “He’s a very capable, hard-working, bright person,” Mr. Craige said. “I know that he was very close to John, not just as an aide, but as friends.”  Mr. Young, whose wife is a nurse, worked on Mr. Edwards’s campaigns as well as in his Senate office. In early 2007, as Mr. Edwards’s presidential campaign was gearing up, records show that the Youngs sold their house in Raleigh for $1.2 million and moved to Chapel Hill, where they rented a more expensive home in a gated community. Last fall, according to an associate of Mr. Edwards and Mr. Young, Ms. Hunter began renting a home in the same community, where she lived until Mr. Baron helped her and Mr. Young relocate to California.  The associate, who asked not to be identified, said Mr. Young has privately made conflicting statements about the extent of his relationship with Ms. Hunter and whether he is the child’s father. But lawyers for Ms. Hunter and Mr. Young have publicly stated that he is the father and that the two had a relationship that began when Ms. Hunter was hired in 2006 to make several documentary videos for Mr. Edwards for his political action committee, One America.  To make the videos, Ms. Hunter and a partner formed Midline Groove Productions, incorporated in Delaware on June 30, 2006, according to state records, less than a week before the company received the first of eight payments totaling more than $114,000 from Mr. Edwards’s committee.  Midline’s sparse Web site, which was no longer available Saturday, described the venture, based in South Orange, N.J., as “a full-service production company committed to projects that reveal truth — the authentic aspects of humanity that are right here and most often overlooked.”  Ms. Hunter was born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1964 as Lisa Druck and moved to New York City in her 20s, becoming part of a Manhattan social scene that included the writer Jay McInerney. In a 2005 article in Breathe Magazine, in which Ms. Hunter and Mr. McInerney exchange dialogue, Mr. McInerney said he dated her for a few months but spent a lot of time with her and her friends, whose behavior “intrigued” him and inspired him to write a book based on their experiences. He said he remembered meeting Ms. Hunter in 1987 at the Manhattan nightclub Nells.  The book, titled “Story of My Life,” Mr. McInerney wrote in the article, “was narrated in the first person from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa.”  Mr. McInerney said he considered the character in the novel, Alison Poole, to be sympathetic. “One of her most striking traits,” he said in the magazine article, “was her obsession with truth-telling and her horror of being lied to, something that I certainly took directly from Lisa.”  Ms. Hunter later moved to Los Angeles and married a lawyer, Alexander Hunter III. The couple bought a $704,000 home in Beverly Hills in 1994, records show, and that same year, she legally changed her name from Lisa Jo Hunter to Rielle Hunter.  In October 1999, the Hunters began divorce proceedings, and the two soon parted ways. Within a few years, Ms. Hunter had set up a Web site that promoted the virtues of spirituality and themes like “Who Am I?” “Tell the Truth” and “Love Everyone.”  In a December 2006 article in Newsweek, Ms. Hunter said that when she first met Mr. Edwards in a New York bar, where he was involved in a meeting, “I didn’t think it was John Edwards because the public persona did not mesh at all with the person who was sitting in front of me.”  Patrick Healy contributed reporting from Santa Barbara, Calif., Nate Schweber from South Orange, N.J., and Jack Styczynski from New York.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Woman in Edwards Affair Will Not Allow DNA Test. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The woman with whom former Senator John Edwards admitted having an affair said she wanted to maintain her privacy and that of her 5-month-old daughter.