In case you are not obsessed with goings on of Bill and Hillary Clinton, you may not recall that Huma Abedin was a top aide to Hillary when she served as Secretary of State during the Obama administration.
Abedin gained notoriety twice. Once was for her involvement in the Clinton email scandal. That was when a lot of official government communications were being secretly stored on a secret server in a bathroom closet in Denver, Colorado. You really cannot make this stuff up.
It was also discovered that Abedin had a laptop server with lots of confidential and – some classified – of her boss’s combinations. She was not authorized to have them outside of the State Department computers.
Actually, they were not on Abedin’s personal computer. They were on a computer owned by her husband. And that is Abedin’s second claim to fame – or infamy. Her husband is Anthony Weiner, a former member of Congress, a one-time candidate for Mayor of New York City, and a convicted sex offender. Weiner – known as Carlos Danger on the Internet — used to engage in online sex chat with women — including underage girls. He would illustrate his sex talk with full-frontal XXX photos, videos and live performances.
Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 when a flagrante delicto photo of him went viral. In 2017, he was charged with “transferring obscene material to a minor.” He was convicted and sentenced to 21 months in prison – after which he was registered as a “sex offender.”
So much for the history lesson. What about Abedin’s sexual assault charge?
Since her separation from Weiner, Abedin kept a low profile – until now. It has been revealed that in an upcoming memoir entitled “Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds,” Abedin alleges that she was sexually assaulted by a United States Senator 16 years ago in 2005. That is just the kind of salacious details that will enhance sales of what might otherwise be a rather boring book – at least in terms of new revelations.
Abedin does not name the Senator – not even revealing his political affiliation. But she does detail the encounter. It was after she had attended the wedding of Donald and Melania Trump. She wrote in the book, “I ended up walking out with one of the senators, and soon we stopped in front of his building, and he invited me in for coffee.”
Abedin makes it sound like she had no responsibility for walking to the Senator’s home. She just “ended up” taking the stroll and taking him up on his invitation to join him in a cup of coffee. I guess “Come up and see my etchings” has been overused.
Once Abedin was seated on the sofa, she wrote that “He plopped down to my right, put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa. I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased.” Presumedly, she departed the scene.
The incident was so traumatizing that Abedin blocked the memory until it was jarred open by the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Judge Bret Kavanaugh back in their high school days.
I know that in the days of the #MeToo Movement, women are to be believed. I guess I am old fashioned. I like to see evidence and corroboration. Several things bother me about Abedin’s story. From what was revealed, there was no contemporary support for her story. She has not revealed whether she had told others – such as Senator Hillary Clinton for whom she was working at the time.
The events even as she described them should not have so traumatized her that she went into psychological amnesia. Ten seconds of getting a kiss – even a tongue-in-cheek kiss – in an act that can be best described as “boorish behavior” on the part of the Senator does not seem like a traumatizing event. How fragile is she? As she describes it, the Senator withdrew in the face of her protest.
If she was so shocked … so traumatized … by what she considered a sexual assault, why didn’t she report the incident. Did she forget what happened on the way home?
And if this incident was important enough to put in her book –and leaked for promotional value — shouldn’t she have named the Senator? Of course, in these cases, the alleged predator is likely to be named. A good place to start would be the senators on the Trump wedding invitation list. Stay tuned.
Finally, her alleged suppressed memory seemed to be rooted in partisanship – suggesting that the Senator may be a Republican. For reasons yet to be explained, Abedin’s memory vault did not get cracked by all those accusations against Bill Clinton – even as Abedin was working for then-Senator Hillary Clinton at the time. Her memory did not resurface when her own husband was exposed (no pun intended) as a sexual predator. Only when Republican Brett Kavanaugh was being accused.
In my lifetime, I have had to comfort people who were violently sexually assaulted … raped. I think this kind of story — based on selling books — does a great disservice to the women – and even the men – who are the victims of truly terrifying attacks resulting in physical and psychological damage.
If the Senator is named, I suspect that he will suffer memory failure. It is not even a good she says/he says story. It is only a “she says” story – and not a very convincing one.
So, there ‘tis.