WEINER TIMELINE
2011
• May 27: Then-congressman Anthony Weiner Tweets a waist-down photo to a 21-year-old female college student in Seattle. The photo is quickly deleted and Weiner claims that his online account had been hacked. In the days following the tweet, spokesman calls the photo “a distraction” perpetuated by a hacker and Weiner fends off questions about the photo.
• June 1: Weiner tells MSNBC he cannot say “with certitude” whether the photo was of him but continues to deny sending it. Meanwhile, photos of a shirtless Weiner surface, purportedly from a second woman.
• June 6: Additional photos and messages purportedly sent to another woman surface. Weiner admits sending the waist-down photo and acknowledges “inappropriate” exchanges with six women before and after getting married. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi calls for an ethics committee investigation.
• June 9: Weiner insists he will not resign despite rapidly eroding support among his fellow Democrats.
• June 11: Weiner announces he’s entering professional treatment and requests a leave of absence from Congress.
• June 12: Photos surface online that were purportedly taken in the House members’ gym and show a shirtless Weiner with a towel around his waist.
• June 16: Weiner resigns from Congress. He apologizes to his neighbors, constituents and wife for his “personal mistakes” and “the embarrassment” he caused.
2013
• May 22: Weiner launches his re-entry into the world of politics with a run for New York City mayor, asking voters for a second chance. He says he can’t guarantee other explicit images won’t emerge or that other people won’t come forward.
• July 23: Weiner admits sending additional explicit photos and texts to a woman he met online. Weiner does not say when the exchanges occurred but said his behavior created “challenges in our marriage that extended past my resignation.”
A leading candidate for New York City mayor, Anthony Weiner, said Tuesday he won’t quit the race despite newly revealed explicit correspondence with a young woman — an exchange she says began months after he resigned from the U.S. Congress for similar behavior.
“This is entirely behind me,” Weiner told a news conference, just hours after he confirmed exchanging sexually explicit photos and text messages with a woman online. “There was no question that what I did was wrong,” he added.
He had resigned his Congressional seat in June 2011 after acknowledging having sexual conversations with at least a half-dozen women.
At Tuesday’s news conference, the 48-year-old Weiner acknowledged some of the newly revealed activity took place after he resigned. He repeated that he put such behavior behind him before deciding to run for mayor.
“I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out and today they have,” Weiner said in a statement issued by his campaign earlier in the day. He also said “some things posted today are true and some are not,” but he did not elaborate.
His wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime adviser to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, made rare public comments on her husband’s behavior.
“I love him. I have forgiven him. And as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward,” Abedin said. She acknowledged that Weiner “made some horrible mistakes, both before he resigned Congress and after.”
She was pregnant when the sexting scandal broke in 2011 and gave birth months later. “It took a lot of work and a lot of therapy to get to the place where I could forgive Anthony,” she said.
After they walked away from the news conference, out of sight of the crowd, Weiner put his arm around her. He then attended a mayoral forum.
The new allegations could severely test voters’ willingness to forgive Weiner, who has said he spent the two years since the scandal trying to make things right with his wife and earn redemption. Three of his rivals for mayor — Bill de Blasio and Sal Albanese, both Democratic candidates for mayor, and John A. Catsimatidis, a Republican — immediately called on Weiner to drop out of the race.
“Enough is enough,” de Blasio said. “I’m calling on Anthony to withdraw from this race, for the good of the city that I know he loves as much as all of us.”
Catsimatidis said, “The Mayor of New York City should be a leader that all the residents of our city, especially our children, can look up to. Anthony Weiner should do what is right for his family and our city and drop out of the race for mayor so we can end this soap opera.”
The newly revealed correspondence was posted Monday by the gossip website The Dirty. The woman involved was not identified. She said their online relationship began in July 2012, when she was 22, and lasted for six months.
She claimed Weiner used the alias “Carlos Danger” for their exchanges, but she knew she was talking to the former congressman.
The woman claimed that she and Weiner exchanged nude photos of themselves and engaged in frequent time on the phone.
The exchanges posted on The Dirty were sexually explicit, and included a pixelated photo of a man. At one point, the man reported to be Weiner wrote, “I’m deeply flawed.”
The woman said Weiner later asked her to destroy the evidence of their chats. She insisted that she was never intimate with Weiner nor had she ever received any payment from him.
Since re-entering public life this spring, Weiner has apologized repeatedly for his behavior. He also has been near the top of most mayoral polls since entering the race.
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