NY Times Confirms Weiner Sent DMs to 17 Year Old
John on June 10, 2011 at 8:38 pm
According to the Times source from within the family, they were non-sexual:
Mr. Weiner sent out a public message saying he wanted to attract more followers on Twitter and offered to follow people on his account if they wanted him to.
The girl responded to the appeal and posted a public message to him: “Don’t forget me. I used to follow you.” On May 16, he began following the girl again, and over the next 10 days they had three private message exchanges, the family member said.
One was about baseball. In another, he replied to a question she had about legislation by jokingly asking for her advice, the family member said. His third message to her was in response to a link she posted to a YouTube video of his giving a speech, with the message: “My true love.”
In a blog post on Tumblr, she later shared the contents of that private message from him. In it, Mr. Weiner appeared to liken himself to a superhero.
“I came back strong,” he wrote. “Large. Tights and cape. …”
She published that quote on May 26th, one day before the story broke. Let’s assume that this is an accurate summary of all of her contacts with Weiner. I don’t think that exonerates him. He clearly singled her out and followed her not once but twice. He clearly had private chats with her. We all know where that went in at least five other cases.
So far as we know, all of Weiner’s initial DMs to women were conversational and political in nature, just like the ones to this girl. That was his chosen method of chatting up the girls he’d selected. But then he would take some opportunity to introduce sex and begin turning the conversations in that direction. Consider what he did with Vegas blackjack dealer Lisa Weiss:
¦1st Contact 8/13: They chat about politics.
¦2nd Contact 8/14: Weiner asks for her take on local politics.
¦3rd Contact 8/19: Weiner describes himself as a superhero.
¦4th Contact 9/17: She mentions a picture of him. He says he’s ready to visit Vegas, asks her “got a night plan for us?” She responds positively and now we’re off to the races with the sexual talk.
My point is that his contact with the 17 year old as reported by the Times fits the pattern pretty closely:
¦1st Contact – Baseball chat.
¦2nd Contact – Weiner asks for her advice on politics.
¦3rd Contact – Weiner describes himself as a superhero.
¦A few days later, Weinergate breaks.
[ASKS FOR HER ADVICE ON POLITICS? ]
I think what we see here is that Weiner was going through his exploratory/grooming process with this girl. That there was no sex talk doesn’t prove he behaved honorably so much as that he ran out of time.
Addendum: Consider what happened with 21 y.o. coed Gennette Cordova. She claimed they exchanged DMs that were non-sexual. Then he sent her a junk-pic which she claims was apropos of nothing. He said it was a “joke” and she said she didn’t get the joke. If you look at his contact with Weiss above, his line “got a night plan for us?” could have been played off as a joke too if she had taken offense. It’s a joke until she responds, then it’s an invitation to cyber-sex.
Okay, so assume Gennette was telling the full truth. That’s one more instance where Weiner selected attractive girls/women to follow and then introduced sexual content down the line. That’s the pattern. Just like he seems to have used and re-used the same photos with different women, I think he used and re-used the same pattern too.
The point is, Weiner sussed these girls out a bit and then injected something sexual when he felt the time was right. He apparently hadn’t reached that point with Ethel, but we have six very good reasons to suspect that was his intent.
[ We don't know ... let's see if they find anything on her computer. ]
verumserum.com
More on the Police Investigation in Delaware (Update: Johnson Beclowns Himself Further; NYT Reports, Cape and Tights Confirmed!)
Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 7:22 pm
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]
Update: Instalink! But the must-read post here is the one that almost certainly caused this whole thing to happen, when Patrick put together powerful circumstantial evidence that Rep. Weiner was sending direct messages to an underage girl.
This is an update to the earlier post Police Visit “Ethel,” because there were too many updates.
We have already seen the strangely-worded denials from Weiner’s office. Allahpundit writes that “[Weiner’s spokeswoman, Rita] Heller’s statement smacks of, ‘This is what he told me but I’m not sure if I believe him anymore either.’” Which has to be worst denial since, well… this:
Meanwhile the “Ethel” family reportedly denies it too:
“She was not targeted in any way and did not receive any inappropriate messages or photos or anything from the congressman,” a source close to the Delaware girl told the Daily News. “If she had, her family would have filed charges.”…
“The blogs have taken a few tweets from a 17-year-old kid and put their own twist on messages that were just kid stuff,” the source said. “Her family has gone through all her accounts and not found any inappropriate messages.”
[BY PATTERICO: I am deleting the next part of Aaron's post. It contains speculation that I believe not to be true, based on things I know that Aaron doesn't. -- P]
Meanwhile this old clip has become more ironic tonight:
Yeah, really terrible of Breitbart to insinuate that Weiner was acting inappropriately in direct messaging a young girl.
Anyway, the correct answer here is not to conclude that Weiner is guilty of misconduct toward this minor, but merely to conclude that there needs to be a thorough investigation. Hopefully that is what is underway.
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Update: The New York Times reports and there are all kinds of juicy things. First they quote Weiner’s Spokewoman Rita Heller—the same language we saw above. But they add this part:
Mr. Weiner’s spokeswoman, Risa Heller, did not provide copies of the messages, but said they were not inappropriate.
Except as we know she didn’t say they were not inappropriate. She said Congressman Weiner said they were not inappropriate. And she didn’t have the copies to prove him right.
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And we now know the computer is in their custody:
In the past few days, the girl and her family have become subjects of intense interest in the news media. On Friday afternoon, the local police arrived at their home and asked the girl and her mother to bring the girl’s phone and computer to the police station so they could be checked to make sure no crime had occurred.
The family member said the family complied, and did not expect any further action to be taken.
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And why are the UK Papers always outclassing the American ones? From the Telegraph:
Even worse is the possibility that underage women may have been among Weiner’s victims. It was conservative bloggers, most prominently Andrew Breitbart at Big Government, that broke the story and forced Weiner into the situation of being unable to continue lying about his Twitter account being hacked.
Now leading the Weiner web sleuthing is Patterico, who earlier today posted a detailed and convincing, though circumstantial, case that there is a very strong possibility that Weiner sent lewd messages and/or images to minors.
Patterico’s post (the third on the subject) is well worth reading (warning: it includes some sordid stuff).
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patterico.com
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35.Again-Big Picture-this is Weiner being told firmly to hit the bricks running. Behind the scenes he is being told it’s over, and if he wants to work again, he had best leave now. The Obama Adminstration is not going to allow some loudmouth lying pervert waving his dick on line at underage girls to embarrass them much longer.
Congress is back in session this week. Congressman Weiner will not be there, unless he wants to duck arrest by Delaware state troopers like a 21st century Adam Clayton Powell.
Comment by Bugg
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Did Anthony Weiner Send Obscene Messages to Teenage Girls Online?
Posted on | June 10, 2011 | View Comments
“Just perfectly innocent. A married 46 year old Congressman private messaging a smitten, hero-worshipping, bad-girl-talking 17 year old girl who ‘loved’ him. What could be more innocent than that?”
– Ace of Spades
Before proceeding to examine the really troubling question here, let’s begin by reviewing what we already know:
Anthony Weiner’s “online relationships” (as he called them in his June 6 press conference) apparently “fit a pattern,” according to the New York Times: “[I]n rapid and reckless fashion, he sought to transform informal online conversations about politics and partisanship into sexually charged exchanges, at times laced with racy language and explicit images.”
A transcript of Weiner’s Facebook exchanges with Lisa Weiss (the accuracy of which has not been disputed) shows Weiner asking if “your p**** [is] still tight and w*t for me baby?” and talking about “my rock hard c***.”
Weiner admitted at his press conference that the May 27 Twitter message including a link to a photo of his bulging crotch, which began the so-called WeinerGate scandal, was accidentally sent as a public message, when he intended to send it as a private direct message (DM).
The intended recipient of that May 27 message, 21-year-old Gennette Cordova, has repeatedly denied having had any “inappropriate” private communications with Weiner.
Another of Weiner’s “online relationships,” porn performer Ginger Lee, says Weiner urged her to lie about their communications, sending her an e-mail suggestion that she issue a statement saying, “‘This is silly. Like so many others, I follow Rep. Weiner on Twitter. I don’t know him and have never met him.” (In fact, Ms. Lee says she and Weiner “exchanged scores of sexual emails over a long period of time.”)
Among the messages Weiner sent to 26-year-old single mother Meagan Broussard was a nude photo showing his erect penis.
From these facts it seems obvious that Weiner’s online sexual adventures were so recklessly indiscriminate as to demonstrate an out-of-control compulsion. This is particularly true if we accept Cordova’s assertion that none of her private communications with Weiner were “inappropriate,” so that the congressman would have been sending her that bulging-crotch photo unsolicited, without any previous indication from Cordova that she had a sexual interest in him. (Broussard has also said that none of her communications with Weiner could reasonably have been viewed as an invitation for the congressman to send her the penis photo of himself.)
Weiner’s complete disregard for the dangers of sending these kinds of photos and messages to women he never met is important to note because, by his own public admission, he also disregarded other dangers:
Q: These were young girls, very young, 21 years old. Does that bother you, that they’re — the youngest –
REP. WEINER: I don’t know the — I don’t know the exact ages of the women, and they –
Q: Young enough to be your children.
REP. WEINER: I don’t know the exact ages of the women, and I don’t know if you do. I’m going to respect their privacy. But they were all adults — at least to the best of my knowledge they were all adults — and they were — and they were engaging — and they were engaging in these conversations consensually.
Q: But if you don’t know how old they are, how do you know they’re adults?
REP. WEINER: Well, all I know is what they publish about themselves in social media. Someone could theoretically be — have been — have been fibbing about it, and that’s a risk.
A close reading of that brief exchange raises real problems. Weiner seems to believe that, in light of the graphic content of his online communications, all that matters is whether “to the best of [his] knowledge” the recipients were adults. He further asserts that the recipients “were engaging in these conversations consensually” even though we have at least two women (Cordova and Broussard) saying that Weiner sent them crotch photos unsolicited, without any prior “inappropriate” communications from the women.
Q. If a 46-year-old man sends a photo of his penis to a minor, does it matter whether (a) this was “consensual,” or (b) the recipient of the photo was “at least to the best of [his] knowledge” an adult?
My guess is that the answer to that question is “no,” but I’m not a lawyer. Patterico is a lawyer, and he has written two long posts examining the likelihood that Weiner was engaged in potentially criminal online communications with minors:
Evidence That Weiner Was Talking Dirty to Underage Girls? Part 2
Evidence That Weiner Was Talking Dirty to Underage Girls? Part 3
Go read both of those posts. The possibility that Weiner was engaged in inappropriate “online relationships” with minors was a topic that arose early in this story — I first mentioned it on May 30 — but nobody really wanted to “go there,” so long as Weiner’s denials were still plausible.
If we did not know for a fact that Weiner was doing anything wrong online, if it was still possible to believe his account had been “hacked,” what did it matter that a number of teenage girls were among the fewer than 100 people he had been following on Twitter?
However, now that we have Weiner’s admission, and numerous lurid details of what the congressman was doing, the possibility that he may have been engaged in similar communications with 16- and 17-year-old girls is now certainly a subject worth investigating. And the evidence marshalled by Patterico is quite suggestive.
Why would one of Weiner’s teen fans, in response to his decision to follow her again on Twitter, after he’d previously dropped her, post the message, ”I GOTTA KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT OR ELSE”?
That teenage girl was not the only minor whom Weiner was following, but what seems highly significant — as Patterico points out — is that she made references to a “tights and cape” super-hero costume, which is exactly what Weiner mentioned in a Facebook message to Lisa Weiss before their exhanges descended into the sexual gutter.
And this returns the WeinerGate saga to its actual origin because we know that “PatriotUSA76? (Dan Wolfe) first raised the alarm about Weiner’s online activities after noticing the public Twitter exchanges between the congressman and some of the teen girls Weiner was following online. In fact, “PatriotUSA76? told Ladd Ehlinger Jr. that it was Weiner’s interactions with minors which escalated his attentions to the congressman:
Nothing personal. Until the young girls came in. Then as a father that bothered me.
And “PatriotUSA76? also told Ehlinger:
Most of the time my group and my tweets were to the effect of “Weiner follows this young girl” – and we would put up a link to a pic of the girl and copy Weiner. We wouldn’t even copy the girl . . . . The couple times that those girls were copied in – I think some of the ladies were talking to the girls as concerned moms . . . We didn’t harass the girls. The thing was about shaming Weiner for following young girls.
This brings us back, as Patterico says, to Tommy Christopher’s June 3 article about “Veronica” and “Betty,” which appeared to exculpate Weiner as the victim of a hoax (saying that the “evidence” was “fabricated”). Now that Weiner has admitted that there was no hoax, and now that we have Ginger Lee saying that the congressman coached her to lie about their online relationship, how do we know that the girls (and their parents) weren’t also part of the same cover-up that Ginger Lee was asked to help perpetrate?
Congressman Weiner has never addressed these questions.
When the subject of his exchanges with “young girls” was raised at his June 6 press conference, Weiner evaded the subject by disclaiming any knowledge of the ages of the women involved. But some of the minors the congressman was following on Twitter were quite clear about being high-school students. And there were no substantive follow-up questions on this subject during the press conference.
Permit me furthermore to observe that, given what we already know, this suspicion cannot possibly be dispelled merely by bloggers or journalists asking questions of the congressman or his online correspondents. Weiner has demonstrated his willingness to lie about his activities, and we have evidence that he enlisted the assistance of others in covering up the truth.
Only a law enforcement investigation can determine
whether or not Anthony Weiner engaged in
potentially criminal communications with minors.
Some of Congressman Weiner’s liberal admirers — including DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz – continue to defend him, and a poll shows a majority of his constituents believe he should remain in office. (A commenter points out: “Only 411 registered voters were surveyed, and the poll was conducted Wednesday, June 8 – perhaps before some of them knew of the X-rated photo.”) Therefore, we are obliged to ask: Would Weiner’s supporters still support him if they knew the whole truth?
Certainly it is time that the whole truth be revealed. Mainstream media organizations cannot responsibly ignore the evidence Patterico has mustered regarding Weiner’s communications with minors. And when Congress returns to Washington on Monday, it can be expected that many members of the House will call on the FBI to begin an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s activities.
theothermccain.com
CNN’s Toobin on May 31: ‘What Andrew Breitbart Was Insinuating About [Weiner] With Young Girls Is Outrageous’
Posted on | June 10, 2011 | 30 Comments and 22 Reactions
There’s no possible way Breitbart could be right, right, right, while CNN’s “senior legal analyst” was wrong, wrong, wrong — or is there?
“This is a silly little thing that happened”? “Not a big deal”? Yeah, idiot: Tell that to the cops who just interviewed the teenage girl in Delaware!
Maybe some of the numbskulls at CNN should go read what “senior legal analyst” Ace of Spades has to say tonight — Ace doesn’t have a network contract, but he’s been right, right, right all along.
UPDATE: Jennifer Preston of the New York Times actually has a pretty solid story about the latest development:
Representative Anthony D. Weiner said on Friday that he had exchanged at least five private messages on Twitter this spring with a 17-year-old Delaware girl who became an admirer of his after hearing him speak during a high school trip to Washington.
Mr. Weiner’s spokeswoman, Risa Heller, did not provide copies of the messages, but said they were not inappropriate.
“According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent,” Ms. Heller said.
A member of the girl’s family who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her identity characterized the messages as “harmless” but expressed concern that Mr. Weiner had communicated privately with the teenager, a high school junior.
The family was aware that there had been exchanges between Mr. Weiner and the girl but assumed that all of their conversations had taken place on a public Twitter feed. Then a scandal erupted last month over a photo Mr. Weiner sent of himself in his underwear to a college student.
Last week, Mr. Weiner acknowledged that he had sent other explicit photos and messages to at least six women he met over social media.
The family member said: “I am angry. This is surreal and unbelievable. It is absolutely crazy. We are just regular people who go to baseball games and basketball games, as ordinary and plain as can be.”
In the past few days, the girl and her family have become subjects of intense interest in the news media. On Friday afternoon, the local police arrived at their home and asked the girl and her mother to bring the girl’s phone and computer to the police station so they could be checked to make sure no crime had occurred.
The family member said the family complied, and did not expect any further action to be taken.
The important thing here is: Weiner admits he sent this teenage girl “at least five” DMs.
Does the phrase “grooming” ring a bell?
OK, that last sentence was probably not what you’d call responsible, professional, ethical journalism. But I have sources I could contact, experts in such matters, and I’m reasonably sure that if they were to take a long, hard look at the available evidence here, their responses would include something like the phrase “warning flags.” Here is Weiner, recklessly cybersexing with complete strangers, sending photos of his junk to people he’s never met — clearly driven by some sort of wild sexual compulsion — and this man is sending DMs to teenagers?
Like I said: “Warning flags.”
theothermccain.com |
