*Anthony Weiner, the 53-year-old former congressman who pleaded guilty in May to sexting with a 15-year-old girl, was sentenced Monday to 21 months in prison, and must spend the rest of his life as a registered sex offender for his multiple social media contacts with the North Carolina teen.
According to USA Today, Weiner cried as he read from a written statement in Manhattan federal court, saying he has hit “rock bottom.” He said he was “a very sick man for a very long time.”
Weiner had asked federal Judge Denise Cote for probation. His lawyer Arlo Devlin-Brown claimed in court papers that his client was “at the depths of an uncontrolled sickness.”
“The sentencing should also reflect the specifics of Anthony’s sickness, which Anthony has made enormous progress in addressing,” Devlin-Brown wrote.
Devlin-Brown also accused the teen victim of “looking to generate material for a book” when she successfully “induced” Weiner’s conduct. The teen documented details of the communications and last year sold her story to a British tabloid for $30,000, Devlin-Brown said.
Prosecutors, seeking 21-27 months in prison for Wiener, wrote that the victim’s motives were not relevant and that Weiner had displayed a “dangerous level of denial.”
“He initially denied his conduct, he suffered personal and professional consequences, he publicly apologized and claimed reform,” prosecutors wrote. “Yet he continued to engage in the very conduct he swore off, progressing … to that which is also destructive to a teenage girl.”
Weiner married Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, in 2010. The couple had a son in 2011. Abedin separated from Weiner in 2016 and filed for divorce after his guilty plea on one count of transferring obscene material to a minor.
The relationship became a crucial factor in the 2016 presidential campaign when then-FBI director James Comey reopened an investigation into Clinton emails less than two weeks before Election Day. The FBI cited a batch of emails discovered in the Weiner probe. Days later, the FBI said nothing new or damaging against Clinton had been discovered.
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