UPDATE: Weiner will address the new allegations in a 5pm ET press conference. Watch it live here.
New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner issued a statement Tuesday responding to the publication of explicit online chat and photo exchanges that allegedly occurred between him and a 22-year-old woman that were published on the gossip site TheDirty.com. Weiner confirmed the exchanges were real:
“I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out, and today they have. As I have said in the past, these things that I did were wrong and hurtful to my wife and caused us to go through challenges in our marriage that extended past my resignation from Congress. While some things that have been posted today are true and some are not, there is no question that what I did was wrong. This behavior is behind me. I’ve apologized to Huma and am grateful that she has worked through these issues with me and for her forgiveness. I want to again say that I am very sorry to anyone who was on the receiving end of these messages and the disruption that this has caused. As my wife and I have said, we are focused on moving forward.”
Prior to Weiner’s resignation in 2011 after the first revelations about his explicit online activities, he admitted he had “exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years.” After announcing his comeback mayoral campaign, Weiner said it was possible more photos might emerge from these exchanges.
Quotes from the unnamed woman in The Dirty’s posts described the exchanges as having occurred after Weiner’s initial scandal in 2011, however the timestamps appear to have been edited out of the images of the chats published on the site.
“This was a bad situation for me because I really admired him. Even post scandal, I thought he was misunderstood. Until I got to know him. I thought I loved him. Pretty pathetic,” the anonymous woman is quoted as saying.
In a follow up post on The Dirty, the woman claimed Weiner initiated contact with her on the social networking site Formspring in July 2012. They continued to correspond on the phone and through a Yahoo email account using the alias “Carlos Danger.”
“We would send naked images to each other and have phone sex. Anthony Weiner would send me penis pictures from his Carlos Danger yahoo email to my Gmail,” the woman is quoted as saying.
The posts on The Dirty included multiple blurred shots of a man’s penis that Weiner allegedly sent to the woman. According to The Dirty, the woman said her relationship with Weiner “began to fizzle out” by November and they only “spoke once” in December 2012. She said he contacted her on Facebook in April of this year after he appeared in a lengthy profile in the New York Times Magazine in which he said he was considering entering the mayor’s race to ask her what she thought of the article.
Apart from Weiner’s statement and the posts on The Dirty the claims of the woman, who remains unnamed, have not been independently corroborated. The Dirty Blogger Nik Richie has not responded to multiple requests for comment. Weiner and his campaign have also not responded to multiple requests for comment about the specific timeline of the exchanges.
(Updated 3:22 PM)
