Anthony Weiner given 21 months in prison for sexting teenage girl
Anthony Weiner was sentenced on Monday to 21 months in prison, in a sexting scandal that some blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
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The former New York congressman and mayoral candidate, who is the estranged husband of the Clinton aide Huma Abedin, had faced up to 27 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor. He must report to prison by 6 November to begin serving his sentence for exchanging explicit messages with a 15-year-old girl.
Pleading with the judge to be spared from prison, the 53-year-old former congressman tearfully said he had been “a very sick man for a very long time”.
“I am profoundly sorry,” he said, reading from a page in front of him. “The crime I committed was my rock bottom … I live a different and better life today.”
As his sentence was announced, Weiner dropped his head into his hand and wept, then stared straight ahead. After the hearing ended and Judge Denise Cote left the bench, he sat in his seat for several minutes, continuing to cry.
Weiner was also fined $10,000. After his sentence is served, he must undergo internet monitoring and must have no contact with his victim. He must also enroll in a sex-offender treatment program.
Before announcing the sentence, Cote said Weiner had shown “no evidence of deviant interest in teenagers or minors”. She also said he was finally receiving effective treatment for what she said had been described as “sexual hyperactivity”.
Prosecutors said Weiner broke the law by having illicit contact with the 15-year-old girl, including asking her to “sexually perform” for him in conversations on Skype and Snapchat. The assistant US attorney Amanda Kramer urged Cote to give Weiner a significant prison sentence, in order to end his “tragic cycle” of sexting.
Weiner’s sexting not only destroyed his career in the US House of Representatives in 2011 but also doomed his campaign for mayor in 2013 and his marriage to Abedin. It also became an issue in the 2016 presidential election.
The FBI was investigating Weiner’s contact with the high school student when it came across emails on his laptop between Abedin and Clinton, prompting the then director, James Comey, to announce in late October 2016, just days before the election, that he was reopening the investigation of Clinton’s use of a private computer server.
Two days before election day, the FBI announced there was nothing new in the emails. But Clinton has blamed Comey’s handling of the episode more than any other factor for her loss to Donald Trump. In a recent NBC interview, she called the FBI director’s intervention “the determining factor” in her defeat.
Weiner’s behavior in all its lurid detail, including his online alias “Carlos Danger” and a selfie of his bulging underwear, turned him and his last name into an irresistible punchline for late-night comics and mortified his wife again and again.
In her new memoir, What Happened, Clinton reveals that Abedin “looked stricken” and burst into tears upon learning her husband had triggered Comey’s so-called “October surprise”.
“This man is going to be the death of me,” Abedin is quoted as saying.
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Lawyers for Weiner said in court papers that he was undergoing treatment and was profoundly sorry for subjecting the girl to what his lawyers called his “deep sickness”. They also portrayed the girl as an instigator, saying she wanted to generate material for a book and possibly influence the presidential election.
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Prosecutors responded that Weiner should be sentenced to up to two years in prison for what he did, and his victim’s motives should not influence his punishment. They urged the judge to put Weiner’s claims of a therapeutic awakening in the context of a man who made similar claims after embarrassing, widely publicized interactions with adult women before encountering the teenager online in January 2016.
The conduct “suggests a dangerous level of denial and lack of self-control”, they said.
In imposing sentence, Cote cited a need in such a highly publicized case to “make a statement that can protect other minors”. Weiner was repeatedly caught sexting, she said, noting that while he had made “great strides” in treatment, “the difficulty here is that this is a very strong compulsion”.
Weiner wore his wedding ring to court. His parents were in the courtroom, but not his wife. He and Abedin are going through divorce proceedings.