Boom! There was the headline at the top of the New York Post website — “Huma Abedin Didn’t Marry Anthony Weiner for His Looks” — a snide feature story if there ever was one.
But while the tabloid journal known for its muckraking may have found gold with its headline, readers may not have guessed how true it really was. The article it linked to didn’t reveal very much other than that the former New York Congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner was up to his old tricks of “sexting” with women (and, unintentionally, at least one man) who were not his wife.
His wife, in this case, happens to be Huma Abedin, the near-constant companion and “body woman” (the political term for her position) of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
His “tricks” are old because — surprise — Weiner has been busted by the media (the New York Post in particular) for exactly this kind of behavior not once, but twice, in the past. In fact, notably, in 2013, the Post and other media outlets had a field day revealing naughty pictures and messages the randy former Representative had sent on the sly to women.
One of those women was Sydney Leathers, a 22-year-old in Indiana who had initially written fan posts on Weiner’s Facebook page. (Leathers subsequently went on to appear in pornographic films following the scandal, earning her her own Post cover story on multiple days).
Weiner infamously referred to himself by the alias “Carlos Danger” in many of the conversations, suggesting that the Representative had an exaggerated opinion of his sexual appeal.
One would think that given this very public humiliation and media beat down at the hands of press baron Rupert Murdoch (the owner of the Post) that Weiner would not be anxious to endure such a spectacle again. Then again, one has to wonder — just how bad is the marriage between Weiner and Abedin that he would engage in such risky behavior after suffering so publicly years earlier?
Surely, this kind of media attention during the height of Clinton’s campaign, coming at a time when media scrutiny of Abedin is at an all-time high, would be most unwelcome.
It’s one thing to imagine that Weiner has the hormones of a man half or one-third of his age. But it’s another to think that as a veteran political operative who’s held office in Washington, Weiner thought his actions would have no effect on his marriage or relationship with Abedin, who in photos with Weiner often looks about as happy as an Arabian oil sheik at a 16-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy’s bar mitzvah.
In fact, the longer one looks at the Weiner-Abedin relationship, the more one has to scratch their head and wonder what these two people are doing together.
Abedin joined Clinton’s camp 20 years ago when she was a fresh-faced 19-year-old intern from George Washington University, and Clinton was First Lady in the White House with her husband Bill (who memorably had his own intern, Monica Lewinsky).
Abedin stuck with Clinton, acting as her personal aide and assistant after Clinton left the White House and during the time when she served as the junior senator from New York State.
Notably, during Clinton’s term as senator, Abedin was able to buy an apartment in Washington, D.C. for $649,000, despite earning a paltry $27,999 in salary the previous year, leading many to wonder how she was able to afford such a purchase.
According to the Post, Abedin met Weiner at a Democratic fundraiser on the Clintons’ old stomping grounds of Martha’s Vineyard in 2001, a year after Clinton left the White House. The Post is sketchy on the details of the couple’s relationship but says that they married in 2010 (their ceremony was officiated by none other than Bill Clinton).
Still, some people who have seen the pair together have remarked on how little chemistry they appear to have, and it certainly was convenient for Abedin that her husband was an active Democratic Party supporter and former worker for Clinton’s New York legislative partner, senior U.S. Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer.
In fact, it’s not hard to imagine Clinton giving advice to Abedin about partnering up with Weiner when the latter was a Congressman from the Empire State.
But are there reasons why Abedin decided to get married to a Democratic politician 11 years her senior who once worked for her boss’ colleague? Are there reasons why Abedin felt she had to get married at all?
The more one looks at this odd couple, the more one wonders what Abedin saw in Weiner, who is from a very different background than herself. Abedin spent the first 18 years of her life growing up in a strict Muslim household in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Her mother still lives in Jeddah, runs a Muslim religious institution there and edits a scholarly publication called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Inexplicably (due to Huma’s working for Clinton at the time), Huma was a remotely based editor for this journal from the years 1996 to 2008.
Huma’s experiences of men and relationships until she came to the U.S. to study were likely to have been very, very different from American socio-cultural norms.
To then be working in the White House a year after she arrived in the U.S. and to discover that one of her peers, Monica Lewinsky, was having an affair with the president must also have been something of an interesting lesson for the young Saudi Arabian woman. Thus, her subsequent choice of a philandering Jewish politician for a husband seems a very curious one.
The New York Post was certainly right about one thing — Anthony Weiner is not high up on the attractiveness scale. In fact, observers who have seen the couple side by side have repeatedly remarked that it appears odd that a pretty woman like Abedin chose to marry Weiner — and that Weiner then turned around and scandalized her.
Surely, this is an indication that their marriage had problems almost from the start. In a recent documentary about Weiner (simply entitled “Weiner”), the couple does not appear to be very intimate. Why would Weiner be searching for amorous action so desperately from other women if he had Abedin at home?
In the wake of the second sexting scandal covered by the Post and others, Weiner was made a laughingstock and was doomed to lose the New York City mayoral race that many had given him a good chance of winning.
If one searches on Google, pictures can be found of Weiner vigorously campaigning on New York City’s Christopher Street in the predominantly gay neighborhood of the West Village, wearing bright red pants that many commentators in the media deemed flashy enough to write an entire news story about at the time. Weiner seemed extremely motivated to appear in the city’s annual Gay Pride parade that year.
In fact, Weiner is no stranger to the press, and some would say he even seeks it out. In the most recent Post cover story, he lamented not getting more media attention in the wake of the story getting out, and one gains the impression reading news articles about Weiner that he’s someone who’s desperate for the spotlight that being in a political office gave him.
And yet, that spotlight may never really go away so long as he’s married to a person so intimately connected with the levers of power in Washington — a person who, coincidentally, doesn’t live in the same city he does for much of the year.
Being Abedin’s husband, Weiner may be privy to many secrets and much gossip about Hillary Clinton that the media would surely have a field day with if someone such as he was to spill the beans.
One could be tempted to say that Weiner’s actions are those of a man who believes he holds informal political power due to such knowledge — knowledge that some may speculate affords him the belief that he’s beyond reproach. Even the Post ran an article entitled, “Weiner’s Antics Could Make Huma a ‘Political Liability.'”
At the end of the day, that knowledge may be more about what keeps this odd couple together, rather than the “love” between a Saudi Arabian woman whose family publishes a theological journal for Muslims and a Jewish former Congressman who famously railed against Saudi Arabia for much of his post-9/11 career and in 2010 was responsible for getting videos by noted Islamic imam Anwar al-Awlaki removed from Youtube.
In fact, the longer one looks at this “marriage,” the more it appears to be a relationship based on carefully managed appearances, rather than on any old-fashioned notions of “romance.”
