I couldn't recover from that Post cover
Huma’s ‘breaking point’
Huma Abedin, the former longtime aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said the “final straw” for her came when The Post published a photo on its front page of her husband, disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner, sexting while lying in bed with their young son.
“I did finally reach my breaking point, because that was the point where for so long, Dana, I was saying, ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Why can’t you just knock it off ?’ ” she told host Dana Bash during an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“And this was my final straw,” Abedin said.
The adviser, who was working on Clinton’s presidential run at the time, also acknowledged that the incident prompted the Administration for Children’s Services to launch an investigation into whether she was a fit parent for leaving her then-3year-old son, Jordan, with Weiner.
“It was one of the hardest things I had to endure,” Abedin said.
“I was asked, ‘Do you think you would have had a better assessment of the conditions if you were a more present parent?’ ” she said.
Abedin recalled feeling “torn” between leaving for the campaign trail and staying home to take care of the couple’s son, adding, “I think a lot of working mothers can relate to what that feels like.”
“It was one of the hardest things that I had to endure in those closing days of the campaign. And I just — I share a story of sitting by the front door not wanting to answer it because I was scared of what was on the other side, angry about what was on the — potentially on the other side,” she said.
Abedin recently recounted her feelings about Weiner’s raunchy behavior in a memoir titled “Both/ And: A Life in Many Worlds,” published in October.
On CNN Sunday,
Abedin said she managed to weather the previous sexting scandals involving her husband — often under the pseudonym “Carlos Danger” — and his resignation from Congress in 2011 and subsequent disastrous run for mayor in New York City in 2013.
But the revelation in 2016 by The Post of the photo of Weiner, a onetime rising political star in the Democratic Party, sexting a young North Carolina teen girl, forced her to confront the realities of her marriage.
She told Bash she “was judged bigtime.”
“I just had to go through all of us on the front page of the newspaper, but, certainly, many women, as men, because I don’t think it’s only women,” she said of the development that led to her “breaking point.”
She went on to file for divorce from Weiner shortly after he pleaded guilty in federal court to sexting with a minor in May 2017.
Weiner was released from federal prison in February 2019 after serving the bulk of his 21-month sentence. He also registered as a sex offender.