Huma Abedin describes feeling ‘rage’ after husband Anthony Weiner confessed sending lewd pic

Abedin’s memoir set to release next month details sex scandal that tore apart marriage

Huma Abedin, former top aide to Hillary Clinton (Getty Images for Hulu)

Huma Abedin felt “rage” after her now-estranged husband Anthony Weiner confessed to sending a lewd picture to an acquaintance in 2011, she writes in a forthcoming memoir.

In Both/And, set to release on 2 November, the former top aide to Hillary Clinton goes into detail about the sex scandal that tore apart her marriage to Mr Weiner, who would later go to prison for sending explicit texts to a 15-year-old.

Excerpts from the book were published on Monday in Vogue, in which Ms Abedin describes the morning she awoke and her husband told the truth after several days of lying to the media, her, and others regarding whether he had been hacked or had sent the picture himself.

“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 writes, explaining that her husband had explained away the lewd picture as a “tawdry joke” or a “dare”.

She then writes: “Whatever personal pain and betrayal I felt, I instinctively set aside. I didn’t break down in tears or collapse on the sofa. The first thing out of my mouth wasn’t ‘How could you do this to me?’ or ‘I thought that you loved me.’ The first thing I said was, ‘You mean you’ve been lying to the whole world for a week?? Anthony, you have people counting on you. You owe them the truth!’”

The couple’s marriage has long been the speculation of US political media due to Ms Abedin’s longtime service, including at the State Department, to the former secretary of State.

Their problems reentered headlines in the waning days of the 2016 election when the FBI announced in a shocking development that thousands of emails sent by Ms Clinton from a private email server had been discovered on the couple’s shared computer seized by agents investigating Mr Weiner’s illegal sexual acts.

Her husband, now a registered sex offender, went to prison in late 2017 and served roughly 18 months of a 21-month sentence.

They filed for divorce in 2017, but settled privately the next year. They have one child together, and have been spotted together in public on rare occasions; their relationship status remains unclear.