She was Hillary Clinton’s aide and the wife of a star politician when a sexting scandal sent him to prison, destroyed their marriage – and derailed her boss’s bid to become president. How did she cope?
Walk of shame, huh? I’ll take it,” says Huma Abedin, reading the name of the lipstick on the makeup artist’s table. It is a bright, cool day in Manhattan and we are at a photographer’s studio, where Abedin is having her photo taken for this interview. Having watched her from afar for so long, first as Hillary Clinton’s elegant, silent assistant, then as the mostly silent and increasingly unhappy spouse of the former congressman Anthony Weiner, I had expected her to be quiet, anxious and guarded, but Abedin, 45, is none of those things. Someone so beautiful could come across as imperious, but with her big, open-mouthed laugh and “Oh gosh, you know better than me!” air, she veers closer to goofy. After 25 years of working for Clinton, she has a politician’s knack for making those around her feel comfortable. She leans forward keenly when spoken to, and makes sure to use everyone’s name when talking to them. She tells us, twice, that she ate “so much comfort food over the weekend at the hospital”, where she waited while Bill Clinton was being treated for a urological infection; he was discharged the day before our interview. “Just burgers and fries, burgers and fries. Food is my weakness,” she says rolling her eyes at herself. Everyone is instantly disarmed. But then she picks up that lipstick and at the word “shame” the makeup artist and I look down awkwardly and Abedin becomes – as she has been for so long, she tells me later over lunch – “the elephant in the room again”. “I lived with shame for a very, very long time,” as she puts it.
The question Abedin hears most is: why? Why did she stay with Weiner after he accidentally tweeted a photo of his crotch while sexting women online in 2011, leading to his resignation from Congress? Why, when he ran for New York City mayor in 2013, did she assure voters that she had “forgiven him”? And why did she stay with him when it then emerged he was still sending women photos of the contents of his trousers? Why did she only separate from him but not divorce him when, in 2016, he sent a woman a photo of himself aroused while lying in bed next to his and Abedin’s toddler son, Jordan? And why were there official emails between her and Hillary on Weiner’s laptop, thereby prompting the then director of the FBI, James Comey, to announce the fateful reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s emails days before the 2016 election?