2/27/2023 0 Comments Huma amadine made him a pervert![]() When she was two, her parents were offered jobs at the university in Jeddah and so the family moved to Saudi Arabia. Instead, she says, to really understand how she, a devout Muslim, was married to an American Jew who ended up in prison for sex offences, you have to go back to her beginnings.Ībedin was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the daughter of two professors, both India-born Muslims. “I know that people want to make this comparison” – between Bill Clinton’s scandal and Weiner’s – “because it seems to the outside world so similar, but to me it wasn’t,” she insists. But Abedin loathes this line of thinking. It’s true that it’s hard not to boggle at the symbolism that she was working at the White House when the president, after initial denials, finally admitted he’d had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. People tend to start with her long relationship with Hillary Clinton, who she has worked for since she was 20 years old, and think that shaped how she handled her own husband’s very public betrayals of her. In order to understand what she did, Abedin says, as she eats her omelette and chips in a downtown restaurant, you have to understand where she came from. I didn’t know who I could trust, so we receded into our corner But I feel like I’m somebody who’s been in the public eye on and off for the past 20 years and someone else has been writing my story, and it felt like the right time for me to write it,” she says. “I think if I’d written this book when people wanted me to write it, in the midst of all the heat and intensity, it would have been a much more bitter book. I ask why she decided to write the book at all, given that it would, inevitably, thrust her right back into the bright glare of public scrutiny. This is the first interview she has given about her book: “And I’m glad it’s not a TV one, because that’s really not me, being in front of the camera,” she says. Having started the book believing that Abedin’s choices were so unrelatable as to be incomprehensible, I finished it feeling as if I probably would have often done the same. Well, her new memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, makes a good fist of answering most, if not all, of these questions. 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? “I lived with shame for a very, very long time,” as she puts it. 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”. ![]() Food is my weakness,” she says rolling her eyes at herself. “Just burgers and fries, burgers and fries. 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. ![]() She leans forward keenly when spoken to, and makes sure to use everyone’s name when talking to them. After 25 years of working for Clinton, she has a politician’s knack for making those around her feel comfortable. 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. 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. 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. W alk of shame, huh? I’ll take it,” says Huma Abedin, reading the name of the lipstick on the makeup artist’s table.
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