Damn hackers. They are capable of going to plunder your privacy and make an honest father look like a social media exhibitionist. The explanation, advanced by Anthony Weiner, 46, elected Democrat of New York State in the House of Representatives, seems all that there is more credible. The pictures posted on Twitter in May 2011 showing him shirtless and in his underwear, his briefs advantageously bulging? A very tasteless joke related, he says, to his surname, which is pronounced in English the same way as the sausages used in hot dogs, and means “penis” in slang.
Yet a survey by the conservative news site Breitbart, close to the far right, clearly establishes that it was Anthony Weiner who accidentally released these photos. The person finally confirms this version and confesses to having sent images of this kind to six women during the previous three years. The case, a first, makes a lot of noise. The rising star of the Democratic camp may invoke the political plot, he will have to resign, not without having indulged in a humiliating mea culpa public.
The pioneer of sexting, a portmanteau associating sex and texting to define the voluntary dissemination of sexually explicit photos and messages, recidivated in 2013 under the improbable pseudonym of Carlos Danger. Problem: The recipient of the images makes them public, ruining Anthony Weiner’s hopes of winning the Democratic primaries for mayor of New York, when he was well placed.
Ego impulses
To make matters worse, his wife, Huma Abedin, is a close associate of Hillary Clinton, then in the middle of the presidential campaign. Never two without three: in 2016, the Daily Mail publishes the testimony of a 15-year-old girl receiving explicit photos of Weiner who apparently knew her correspondent was underage. He was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison in September 2017.
Politicians certainly do not have a monopoly on sexting, a practice popularized by the millennial generation, but they succumb to it more often than in turn. On their own initiative or after being encouraged to do so. “I am ashamed in front of the whole earth”, reacts the national councilor of the Swiss Greens Geri Müller after the press revealed his sending of selfies showing him in the simplest device while he was in his office in the town hall of Baden.
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