Huma Abedin, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton, says in a new book that she considered killing herself after husband Anthony Weiner was caught in a sexting scandal, which eventually landed him in jail.
“You write that, for a brief second, you contemplated walking off the subway platform?” Norah O’Donnell of CBS Evening News asked Abedin in an interview over the weekend, according to the Daily Mail.
“Well, one of the best things I’ve had in my life is my faith, and the belief that there is always a way through,” the 45-year-old Abedin said.
She also revealed that Weiner was having sex in the apartment the couple shared. “I know it’s hard for you to say it, but you found that he was having physical relationships in your apartment?” O’Donnell asked.
“Yes,” Abedin said. “It was that moment that I realized the way I had been handling my response to him was not working.”
Hawking a new book, “Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds,” Abedin said last week that she was once sexually assaulted by a U.S. senator. She said the assault occurred in the mid-2000s while she was working as an aide to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to The Guardian. Abedin does not identify the senator.
“Abedin — the estranged wife of serial pervert and ex-con former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner — said the assault happened after a dinner attended by ‘a few senators and their aides,’” according to the New York Post. “Clinton, for whom she served as a longtime right hand, was not there.”
“I ended up walking out with one of the senators, and soon we stopped in front of his building and he invited me in for coffee,” Abedin wrote, according to the Post. “Once inside, he told me to make myself comfortable on the couch.”
She wrote that the senator then took off his sport coat, rolled up his sleeves, and then made some coffee as they chatted. Then he “plopped down to my right, put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa,” she said, according to the Post.
“I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away,” Abedin wrote. “All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased.”
The senator, Abedin said, apologized and told her he had “misread” the situation, then asked if she wanted to stay.
“Then I said something only the twentysomething version of me would have come up with — ‘I am so sorry’ — and walked out, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible,” Abedin wrote.
Abedin said she didn’t think of the incident again until allegations of attempted sexual assault emerged against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
In a Vogue excerpt from the book, set to be released November 2, Abedin also recounted when the sex allegations came out about her husband.
“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. Anthony opened his mouth to speak and, as though a dam wall burst, words came flooding out. He said that he couldn’t stand lying anymore. His body shook as he tried to choke back tears,” she wrote.
“Over the next few minutes, he admitted he had intended to send the picture as a direct message with someone he had befriended over Twitter, but accidentally posted it publicly and deleted it (but not before someone had screen-grabbed it), that it had been a tawdry joke, a dare, it didn’t mean anything and he was ashamed and embarrassed and sorry that he had brought this upon us. I felt something explode inside my chest, and suddenly it was hard to breathe. 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,” she added.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a free hotline for individuals in crisis or distress or for those looking to help someone else. It is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255.