Admitting that he had “not been honest with myself, my family and my constituents,” Rep. Anthony Weiner has confessed at a press conference that he sent via Twitter the picture that has captivated Washington for the past week — and that he lied about his account being hacked.
“I regret not being honest about this,” Weiner said in a tearful statement. “I was embarrassed, I was humiliated. I was trying to protect my wife. I was trying to protect myself from shame.”
He claimed to have tweeted the picture on May 27 to Seattle student Gennette Cordova “as a joke” but then “panicked” and removed the tweet from his Twitter account. Cordova, however, doesn’t understand what joke that would be. “Am I the only one still confused?” she tweeted during the press conference.
“Once I realized I had posted it on Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said I’d been hacked,” Weiner explained.
Weiner said he has had “cursory direct message contact” with Cordova and that she was not one of the women he was having an online relationship with.
Weiner said he has had online relationships with six unnamed women on Facebook and his wife knew about them in general — but she did not know until this morning that he had lied about his Twitter account being hacked. He said he had never met the women in person and the relationships had been entirely based on conversations on the Internet, conducted from his home computer rather than a government machine. All the women had received inappropriate photos from Weiner. He claimed not to know the ages of the women and they had all claimed they were adults.
“It’s always true in social media that you are relying on those characterizations, and I took them at their characterizations,” he said.
“This was me doing a dumb thing, doing it repeatedly and then lying about it,” Weiner said. His wife was not standing by his side, and he broke down several times when mentioning her.
Weiner insisted that he would not be resigning and would be “fighting very hard” to persuade his constituents that he should be re-elected in 2012.
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