NEW YORK Anthony Weiner has tossed his hat into the race for New York City mayor, joining a crowded field and formally beginning an attempt to come back from a scandal that forced him to resign from the House of Representatives.
After weeks of speculation, the disgraced former congressman made it official with a YouTube video.
I have a few questions I think he should be asked. Start with the DMs he sent to a high school girl in Delaware, and the creepy “cape and tights” line that he used with her — a line he also used with an adult woman with whom he exchanged sexually explicit messages.
As I noted in a June 11, 2011 blog post titled Weinergate: Five Is Not Two:
- On Wednesday, June 8, the New York Post was told that the girl was telling her mother that there had been only two G-rated messages:
The girl’s mother, whose name is being withheld, told The Post Wednesday that Weiner sent nothing obscene — and sent only two brief messages to her daughter about seeing him during an April school trip to the Capitol. . . . The mom said she pointedly questioned her daughter about whether Weiner sent her anything obscene, and the girl swore it was all G-rated.
Note: this is not a claim that she showed her mom messages, but that she had told her mom the messages were G-rated. And that there were only two.
- On Thursday, June 9, 2011, this blog published proof that Weiner had sent the girl the second message quoted at the top of this post: a reference to Weiner being a Superman in cape and tights. This direct message seemed especially creepy given that Weiner had employed identical “cape and tights” imagery as a grooming line for a woman with whom he had exchanged explicit sexual messages…
- On Friday, June 10, 2011, now that the “cape and tights” line was out of the bag, all of a sudden we were being told that there had been five direct messages, and not two. Their alleged content was described in the New York Times, and the creepy line “I came back strong. Large. In charge. Tights and cape shit …” was edited to read: “I came back strong … Large. Tights and cape. …” Readers were not informed that Weiner had included an expletive in his message to the 17-year-old high school junior — much less that the “[t]ights and cape shit” line resembled a line that Weiner had used with an adult woman with whom he had sexted.
It is an open question whether Weiner went down the same road with the high school girl that he went down with the Vegas blackjack dealer — or whether he would have, at some point, if he had not been found out.
I think it’s high time these questions were explored.
