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A JOURNEY OF TRAUMA AND SHAME

Huma Abedin was at Hillary Clinton’s right hand, married to a congressman and pregnant . . . then her world fell apart, she tells Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson.

Shortly before her world tilted irreversibly on its axis and her reality shattered into a thousand pieces, Huma Abedin was staying at uckingham alace as a guest of the Queen. Eight weeks pregnant, Abedin had come to ondon for arack bama’s state visit to the UK as part of the White House entourage.

he took out a piece of the pale blue headed palace notepaper and wrote a letter to her husband. “Dear Anthony,” it read. “Is it possible for any two people to be happier or more blessed?” Her only worry was that the long orange fitted gown that she had brought for the white tie dinner would be too tight over her expanding belly.

“I was living what I would have told you was a perfect life,” she tells us. “I never imagined what the next four days would bring.”

What followed after that letter in May

was a whirlwind of scandal, fury and heartbreak. Abedin’s husband, Anthony Weiner, at the time a Democratic congressman, texted her to say that his Twitter account had been hacked and that somebody had posted an indecent photograph of him. That wasn’t true. In fact, he had tried to send a sexually explicit picture of himself to a woman as a direct message but had accidentally posted it publicly. Eventually he confessed the truth to his wife. “The moment he told me it was him, it was like a bolt of lightning just struck me from the top of my head,” Abedin says.

As Weiner phoned his advisers to arrange a press conference, Abedin went outside and stared at the pond behind their house. “I’m thinking, ‘What is happening to my life?’ It was unravelling before me, I couldn’t understand it. [I was] somebody who for so much of my life had maintained so much control over myself, I was very good at my job ... I felt so helpless and angry. It was the beginning of what I didn’t know then [was] a very long journey of trauma, and shame and shock and anger and bitterness.”

Abedin, , has been Hillary linton’s right hand woman and trusted adviser for more than years, travelling to more than countries with

her when Clinton was first lady, secretary of state and then a presidential candidate. Yet Abedin has had to juggle her high-powered career with the very public break-up of her marriage and a humiliating series of revelations that culminated in Weiner being sent to jail for sexting a teenager.

For years Abedin was in the background as the elegant trusted aide or the beautiful supportive wife. Now she has written a memoir telling her own extraordinary story for the first time. “I’m a behindthe-scenes, invisible person,” she says, “but it felt as though other people were beginning to write my history and I wanted to share my truth.”

Born in Michigan, Abedin grew up in Saudi Arabia after her parents, both academics, got jobs at the university there.

Her mother is Pakistani and her father was Indian – he died when she was 17 after a long illness. The book is called Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds because, she says, “we increasingly live in an either/or world, but for me it has always been both. I can be an American Muslim and also a patriot,

I can be both Indian and Pakistani. It’s about balance.”

She went to college in Washington, found a job as an intern at the White House and was offered a permanent role before she had graduated. Weiner was a rising political star, charismatic and glamorous. Abedin was worried about dating a non-Muslim, but he showed his devotion to her by giving up pork and alcohol and fasting during Ramadan. He was her first serious relationship, she was a virgin when they married, and Bill Clinton officiated at their wedding. “If every wedding is a wonder, this one is a miracle,” he told the assembled guests. Ten months later Weiner had admitted to sexting multiple women and lying about it.

Abedin remembers feeling a sense of “rage”, for her unborn child as much as for herself. “I was immediately protective of this life I was growing inside me,” she says. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I had terrible nightmares. It was everything from women coming to take my baby to losing my baby. I felt people were always watching or listening. I didn’t know who I could trust, I’d lost all sense of security and privacy.”

But she stayed, hoping that her husband’s behaviour was an anomaly. “I loved him. It’s not like people had not heard of sex scandals in politics. This was entirely online. It felt like a game,” she says. “More than anything, because I lost my father when I was young, I wanted to give this baby an opportunity to grow up in a house with, you know, two parents.”

When in 2013 Weiner ran for New York mayor, having resigned as a congressman,

Abedin stood by his side at a press conference, telling voters: “I love him, I’ve forgiven him, I believe in him.” Now she says: “I didn’t understand that the behaviour was actually getting worse, that it was not something somebody could just turn off. I didn’t understand addiction, I didn’t understand compulsive behaviour.”

It is impossible to ignore the parallel with Hillary Clinton, who stood by her husband after his affair with Monica Lewinsky was exposed. “I know others like to make these comparisons,” Abedin says, “but every situation is different. The only advice that she’s always given me is, ‘I’m here to support you. Whatever you choose, I’m here.’ And she has been.”

The clash between the public and private worlds became almost unbearable. In the closing stretch of the 2016 presidential election campaign – when Hillary Clinton was up against Donald Trump – The New York Times published an explicit photograph Weiner had sent to another woman, of him in bed next to their sleeping son Jordan, who was a toddler at the time.

I had terrible nightmares . . . I felt people were always watching or listening. I didn’t know who I could trust, I’d lost all sense of security and privacy.

It was the final straw for Abedin, who told Weiner the marriage was over. “That experience was so utterly shocking,” she says. “I felt like my insides were just coming apart. There’s shame and then there’s violence. This was violence.”

A neighbour reported Weiner to the authorities. “I had to very quickly shift to deal with the reality of a child services investigation,” Abedin says. “The challenge of doing your job and being a mother and coming home to a letter that starts with ‘What kind of mother ... ?’ That was very difficult.”

Incredibly, things got even worse the next month when it was alleged that Weiner had been sexting a 15-year-old girl, a federal offence. “By then I couldn’t even feel any more,” Abedin says. “It felt selfish to feel anything. It was so insane, the reality of my life.”

When the FBI seized Weiner’s laptop they found official emails between Abedin and Clinton, prompting James Comey, the FBI director at the time, to announce the reopening of an investigation into Clinton’s electronic communications just days before the election.

Abedin came to feel like the “elephant in the room” wherever she went. “When people are going through what I went through, there is some level of shame that comes with it. Women feel judged for the decisions we make – judged for staying, judged for doing nothing, judged for doing something.” She volunteered at a food bank and was asked not to return. She felt “shunned” as friends started uninviting her from parties. “Your self-confidence gets shaken to its core.”

That is, she says, one reason for writing the book. “I’m taking the power away from the trauma, I’m [no longer] living in shame. I’m done with bracing for the next piece of bad news, bracing for another alleged wrongdoing. I’m focused on the future.”

Her overwhelming priority is her son, who is now 9. “I don’t want history repeating itself. So much trauma that people go through is a result of what they experienced when they’re young. My biggest job is to raise my son in a way that he feels loved and supported.”

When Weiner was sent to prison, she told Jordan that it was “time out” for bad behaviour. She decided that he shouldn’t see his dad in jail, but he missed him desperately. Once, when they were on holiday with the Clintons in Hawaii, he saw another little boy being carried by his father and broke down in floods of tears. “That was my ‘aha’ moment,” Abedin says. “I was the mother saying, ‘I will not allow my son to visit prison,

it’s going to be too traumatic.’ And I realised the separation from one of the most important people in his life was actually traumatic.” She arranged a visit, and Jordan “was beaming when he walked out. He displayed the photo [of the visit] proudly in his room. My son has nothing to be ashamed of, I want him to walk with pride”.

It’s hard to believe that Abedin can forgive Weiner for all the heartache and betrayals. “I lived in anger and bitterness, and ‘why? why? why?’ for so much of my life, it almost killed me,” she replies. “I can’t do it any more. To be healthy and happy and to approach the world in a way that I feel like I’m now able to, I can’t hold on to that anger. I just can’t. It’s gone. I’ve dealt with it.”

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2021-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

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