Anthony Weiner scandal: Huma Abedin’s role
Julie Roginsky and Jim Pinkerton on Huma Abedin’s involvement with the Clintons and decision to stand by her man throughout scandal
Question on the table: did Anthony Weiner court Huma Abedin via Sext-messages? Sound unlikely?
Why? We know they texted – Anthony says so in a piece published last April in the New York Times Magazine.
He was sending crotch photos to women during the months that Huma and he were dating, during their engagement and even while she gave birth to their son.
We also know he has lewd online relationships with numerous women, and we know of at least one that progressed to professions of love – to the woman known as Ms. Sydney Elaine Leathers, with whom he proposed setting up a pied a terre in Chicago.
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It’s pretty clear he had trouble distinguishing between e-love and the real thing.
Is it so crazy to think that Huma has absurdly stood by her man because she knew of his ghastly behavior, having seen it first hand?
Women across the country are scratching their heads, wondering why any self-respecting female – and especially one who is so attractive and accomplished – would put up with the hideous revelations that Carlos Danger, er Anthony Weiner, has spewed forth.
There are several theories. One, which seems totally plausible, is that Huma is inspired by her mentor and “mother figure” Hillary Clinton, who not only stood up for wayward husband Bill, but has profited handsomely for doing so.
Despite a rocky start, when Hillary blamed a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for having promulgated stories about Bill’s serial infidelities, the former first lady rode a wave of sympathy and her husband’s resurgent popularity to various important way-stations, and is now judged the front-runner to take the White House in 2016. Not bad for a wronged wife.
Hillary is seen by many as insatiable in her political ambition; where would she be if she had walked away from her unfaithful husband? Probably very capably and invisibly managing a left-wind think tank.
Bill’s coattails have proven durable; even President Obama has been known to hop aboard, notwithstanding personal froidure between the two men.
Let’s face it, Hillary made the right choice. She and Bill occasionally bump into one another when their globe-trotting intersects. You couldn’t really call it a close relationship, but who’s counting?
Huma, on the other hand, has not yet revealed any political ambitions of her own. It seems likely that a young woman who worked during college as a White House intern and then attaches herself to the hard-charging Hillary harbors dreams of running for office.
In which case, clinging to Weiner for political advantage a la Hillary makes sense; still, at the moment, Huma seems focused only on her husband’s political future. Ambitious, though, she surely is; it was, after all, Huma, who did not want Weiner to resign from Congress.
Why anyone would expose herself and her son to the shellacking that was inevitably going to come from her husband’s mayoral candidacy is almost impossible to imagine?
Granted, the baby at 18-months is not yet old enough to be tarred by the ongoing scandal. But he will be one day, and when he Googles mom and dad, he’s unlikely to be impressed.
Did she really think that with more revelations to come that Anthony actually had a shot?
Was it so important to both of them to regain the limelight?
To reappear at the red carpet events that apparently they so missed?
We don’t know, but that she was complicit in the effort to airbrush his past is beyond doubt.
She enthusiastically participated in the soppy stories of his (their) rehabilitation. The P.R. campaign started in the summer of 2012 when the sidelined couple “came out” in a story with People Magazine.
A New York Times Magazine this April was one of the all-time great puff pieces; in between baby talk Anthony laments his fate at the hands of “one fateful tweet”. (A phrase that goes unchallenged by author Jonathan Van Meter.) Weiner also claims “I don’t have this burning, overriding desire to go out and run for office,” which, considering the past few months, is hard to swallow.
In the uncomfortable press conference the two staged a few days ago, Huma won much sympathy by appearing nervous and by admitting as much when she began her prepared remarks.
I don’t buy it.
To Van Meter, Weiner describes Huma this way: “She is the most competent, graceful person I’ve met in all my years in politics. . . . And she’s the hatchet woman! The person at the side of the principal is usually the bad guy.”
Is it likely that the “hatchet woman” is put off by a pesky media mob?
At the least, Huma is an enabler of Anthony Weiner’s addiction – addition to attention, to women, to adulation, whatever.
He’s clearly a sick individual, and her support will allow him to carry on in a make-believe world where sending pictures of one’s genitals to strangers is ok.
In the People interview Huma says “I want people to know we’re a normal family.” She’s wrong -- normal is squabbling over wallpaper colors or why the kids are late for school. There’s nothing normal about this.
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