Former Congressman Anthony Weiner was reduced to tears on Monday as the Judge announced his verdict — he had been sentenced to a total of twenty-one months in prison. His crime? Sexting a fifteen-year-old girl.
The federal judge had then ordered Weiner to turn himself in by the sixth of November. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release and a $10,000 fine according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In a desperate attempt for leniency, Weiner claimed, “I was a very sick man for a long time. I have a disease but I have no excuse.”
Federal Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York also stated that Weiner’s sentence carried much more importance because of his former political career. Cote had remarked, “Because of the defendant’s notoriety, there is intense interest in the defendant’s plea and sentence It could make a difference in lives and is a very significant part of this sentence.”
She also drilled the seriousness of the situation and stated that Weiner deserved “serious punishment“. Later on claiming Weiner has “a disease. A compulsiveness. Some may call it a sex addiction.”
In May, Anthony Weiner pleaded guilty for the offence of sending X-rated material to a fifteen-year-old girl. The charges were based on how Weiner had persuaded the minor into taking off her clothes and touch herself via Skype in 2016. Weiner was fully aware of the girl’s age when they first started communicating, prosecutors said.
During the sentence hearing, Federal Judge Cote claimed it was irrelevant that the girl had contacted Weiner first.
Weiner’s attorneys claimed his crimes were a “product of sickness” and maintained that he wasn’t a sexual predator.
In his initial plea back in May, Weiner had claimed that his illness was the reason behind why he had committed these awful crimes, even though he knew about how wrong they were.
Anthony Weiner’s career first started spiraling out of control half a decade before the sexting case. He had to resign from the Congress in June 2011 after a lewd picture of his had been uploaded onto his Twitter. Weiner first claimed it had been a hack but later revealed that he had lied. Sexually charged texts with several women also appeared around this frame of time.
However, Weiner claimed that his marriage with then-wife Huma Abedin was integral. She had just given birth to their son.
Later in 2013, as a desperate attempt to revive his career, Weiner ran for the New York mayoral elections. Just two months after he had announced his candidacy, screenshots of sexual conversations Weiner had with other women surfaced.
Despite several attempts of looking past her husband’s mistakes, Ms. Abedin announced she was separating away from her husband just last month.
The investigation into Weiner’s sexting case also played a major role in the last year’s 2016 presidential election, when authorities found emails on his laptop from Ms. Abedin who was a senior aide to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
A separate FBI investigation had been placed into Mrs. Clinton’s private use of email while she was secretary of state and was later closed after officials said nothing impeaching had been found.
