From left: Michelle Obama holds Huma Abedin’s son, Jordan, then 2 months old, next to her and Hillary Clinton in Washington, D.C.Photo: Sonya Herbert/The Obama White House
There was husbandAnthony Weiner’s first sexting scandal — the one in 2011that blew upjust one year into their marriage, when she was pregnant, and precipitated his resignation from Congress. Then there was his second major scandal, in 2013 (under the nom de plume Carlos Danger) and then a third in 2016 — the one involving a lewd photo with the couple’s sleeping 4-year-old son in the frame; and the one when Abedinsent Weiner packing.
Finally, in 2017 Weinerwent to federal prisonon a 21-month sentence for sexting with an underage girl over Skype.
But now, in hernew memoirand an interview with PEOPLE, Abedin reveals that there was even more to Weiner’s sexual compulsions — as she learned later, his self-destructive behavior had a diagnosis — than what made headlines.
In June 2019, one month after Weiner wasreleased from prisonand on the same day that theNew York Postobtained a photo of him with a woman he’d begun dating, Abedin, 45, went “pain shopping” through an old phone of his.
“I found what I was looking for and I read it all,” she writes inBoth/And: A Life in Many Worlds. “It took me eight hours.”
From left: Huma Abedin marries Anthony Weiner on July 10, 2010. Former President Bill Clinton (center) officiated.Courtesy of Barbara Ries
The cover of Huma Abedin’s memoir.Simon and Schuster
Through emails and texts and photos and “love letters from Anthony to women not named Huma,” Abedin writes, she discovered that Weiner’s infidelity had been more than a “digital fantasy.”
Abedin, in an easygoing hour-long chat with PEOPLE, says matter-of-factly that Weiner’s extramarital physical relations — as she pieced the data from his phone together — began some time after his second sexting relapse in 2013.
At that time, she was working at the State Department and traveling the world with Secretary Clinton while Weiner was stay-at-home dad to their toddler son, Jordan.
She describes her painful, clandestine discovery as something of an epiphany, a last straw that allowed her, finally, to let go of years' worth of anger and bitterness. “I was always bracing for the next bad news call, the next piece of, ‘Aha! We discovered this,’ " Abedin says, adding that it was her lifestyle for so long that she almost titled her bookBracing.
“One of the things I learned is that, as time went on, his behavior got more and more dangerous. And look where it led. The whole world knows where it led —a disastrous end resultand difficult consequences,” she says. “Now, I’m not bracing for the next news call. It was all in there.”
Hillary Clinton (left) and Huma Abedin in after Clinton launched her 2016 presidential campaign.Hillary for America/Barb Kinney
Abedin’s next step was a therapist-guided process with Weiner called disclosure, in which he wrote down “his entire romantic history” and she laid out for him how “finally knowing the full truth” felt and then he mapped out a practical, actionable plan for making things right with her and their son.
“In disclosure, you share deeply painful truths with each other. You do the work on yourself — and each other — on how to rebuild trust,” Abedin says.
So much pain, she remembers. But it had a purpose: “It was a very difficult process, and it was really about our son.”
“Anthony is always going to be in my life because he is the father of my child,” she says. “I want to make sure he’s healthy, that we are in a healthy relationship, that our son sees model behavior that is healthy for him.”
From left: Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner in 2011.Andrew Savulich/NY Daily News via Getty
Huma Abedin on Executive One Foxtrot, the military plane carrying then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.William J. Clinton Presidential Library
An Addiction, Not a Choice
Reliving her marital trauma in order to writeBoth/And, whose chapters on Weiner’s scandals hold very little back, was “great therapy,” Abedin says now. (She decided to plunge forward with the book after a male friend told her, “No one is going to want to read more about this scandal and you’re not going to be able to satisfactorily answer people’s questions.” Proving him wrong proved incentive.)
Has she forgiven him? She pauses. “I think you have to forgive to move on,” she says. “And it took me a while to understand that.”
It helped that she could feel “empathy” for Weiner once his compulsive behavior was diagnosed as an addiction, she says.
For a long time, she couldn’t understand his reckless and sexual online behavior. “I didn’t have a lot of experience,” admits Abedin, who was raised to save sex for marriage. (“That was a choice I made,” she says.)
She thought her husband was making a choice, too, when he repeatedly betrayed her. “I thought, back in 2011, that whatever Anthony was dealing with, he could just knock it off,” she says. “Part of it is I was raised with so much discipline and moderation and control. I mean, I was so good at control that it was hard to understand why he couldn’t just get everything under control. I absolutely thought it was a choice.”
“I did not see it as a mental illness. But once somebody self-sabotages over and over again, I just don’t believe that’s something somebody does intentionally. … I learned from my parents this concept of ‘radical empathy,’ and I’m able to show him empathy now.”
“I realize, my God, it’s a privilege to be alive and healthy and have a family, a son, an extended family that loves me, and I’m just grateful to have that,” she says. “I’m not living in that old world of anger and’Why?' I’ve made peace with myself, I’ve made peace with my ex, and we’re figuring out how to live in this world.”
From left: Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin and Nelson Mandela in 2009.Courtesy Huma Abedin
The Next Chapter
In what she describes as “the final stages of our divorce,” Abedin and Weiner today live in separate apartments in the same New York City building. Almost every weekday morning, he comes to her and Jordan’s apartment and, together, they walk their now-9-year-old son to school.
Abedin remains in what she calls “Hillaryland,” as chief of staff to the former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. While Abedin says she can envisionnotworking for Clinton, “I don’t see a world where I’m completely disconnected from Hillaryland. I think she’ll be a presence in my life for a long time.”
She cannot quite yet envision her own next act.
“I’m stealing Shonda Rhimes’s approach to the world when she [talked about] ‘my year of saying yes.’ I’m in kind of the same place, which is I’m open to all kinds of new ideas and suggestions,” Abedin says.
Does that includeDancing with the Stars?
From left: Huma Abedin with her son, Jordan.Courtesy of Opal Vadhan
And does Abedin’s own “year of saying yes” extend to dating?
“Oh, I’m an optimist about love and marriage,” she says. “It’s not something I see in my future right now. I only have one man in my life, and he’s 9. But I have no hard feelings of ‘I would never do this’ or ‘I would never do that.’ "
source: people.com
