Huma Abedin reveals in her new memoir how she lovingly consoled hubby Anthony Weiner after he claimed hackers posted a crotch shot on his Twitter account — and her disgust when he finally came clean to her.
Abedin, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, describes how her perfect world was turned upside down when her spouse, a congressman from Queens at the time, copped to his seamy antic in late May 2011.
“I walked down the stairs and found Anthony standing in the door frame with his head down, bags laid at his feet. Not in. Not out,” Abedin says in the book excerpt published in Vogue on Monday.
“‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
“And then, just like that, life as I knew it was officially over,” she writes in the book, “Both/And: A Life in Many Words.”
”It’s true,’ he said. ‘I sent the picture.’
“I still remember everything about where we were in that moment, the white shaggy rug, the wooden staircase, the front door ajar, the sofa to my left,” says Abedin, who filed for divorce from Weiner in May 2017.
“Anthony opened his mouth to speak and, as though a dam wall burst, words came flooding out.”
She says she had to leave the home, with “every fiber in my body screaming: What is happening to my life?”
Later, as Weiner “repeated how sorry and ashamed he was” to her, he added, “I just want our baby to be proud of their daddy,” Abedin writes.
“Then why did you do what you did? The words raged in my head,” Abedin says.
She writes that she was later told even President Obama “wanted to reach out” to her to comfort her during the scandal.
“A phone call with the president of the United States to talk about my personal humiliation? It was more than I could bear. ‘Please just tell him I am so sorry for embarrassing the administration,’ ” Abedin says she told his deputy chief of staff.
Abedin writes that just a few days before she learned the truth from Weiner, she’d been gushing to him while on a work trip abroad about how much she loved him and their life together.
“I pulled out a single piece of stationery and wrote a letter to my husband.’Dear Anthony – Is it possible for any two people to be happier or more blessed? Some days, I cannot believe it. We must remember to be grateful to God that He has given us so much. I love you. Huma Weiner, May 24, 2011,’ ” Abedin wrote on a sheet of “pale blue palace stationery” from Buckingham Palace in London, where she was staying with Clinton.
Weiner texted her soon after, writing, “My Twitter was hacked and someone posted a photo.
“There might be a story, but I am working on fixing the problem. Nothing for you to worry about. See you soon,” he wrote.
The day he picked her up from the airport as she arrived home in Queens, she writes, “That morning the New York Post reported that an indecent image of a man wearing gray boxer briefs had popped up on Anthony’s Twitter feed before being quickly deleted.
“Just as Anthony had said in his message to me, his spokesman was claiming the photo was the work of a hacker,” Abedin recalls.
“As we drove home to Forest Hills from LaGuardia, his right hand resting on my belly for the 10-minute ride, I went into consoling mode. I felt violated, angry for him, but also confident that he would get past it.”
But she writes in her memoir that the next weekend, her lying husband told her he sent the crotch shot to “someone he had befriended over Twitter” but had accidentally posted it publicly before he could delete it.
“I felt something explode inside my chest, and suddenly it was hard to breathe,” Abedin writes. “I was simultaneously filled with rage and stunned to my core. It felt like a bolt of lightning had struck me and run straight through my body.”
But the revelation was the tip of the iceberg.
Weiner’s political career — and marriage — were eventually torpedoed by subsequent revelations of his serial sexting, which later sent him to prison for sending racy texts to an underaged Bronx girl.
He infamously used the nickname “Carlos Danger” when sexting at least some of them.
Abedin says her unwanted immersion into the controversy was compounded by the fact that she had yet to reveal she was pregnant — until the press picked up on it in the midst of the developing scandal in 2011.