Anthony Weiner Starts Serving Sentence At Massachusetts Prison
AYER (CBS/AP) — A sexting compulsion that cost Anthony Weiner his seat in Congress and a chance to be New York City's mayor has now cost him his freedom too.
Weiner, a Democrat, arrived at Devens Federal Medical Center in Ayer Monday morning to serve a 21-month sentence for illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl.
The facility is about 40 miles west of Boston, has more than 1,000 inmates at the medical center and more than 100 at an adjacent minimum security satellite camp.
It's the same facility that once housed Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Weiner was sentenced in September by a judge who said Weiner's crime resulted from a "very strong compulsion." A tearful Weiner said he was undergoing therapy and had been "a very sick man for a very long time."
Amid a sexting controversy involving women, Weiner resigned his House seat in 2011 only to have new allegations doom his 2013 run for mayor.
Last year, a criminal probe into his sexting with a high school student intruded into Democrat Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House. Then-FBI Director James Comey announced in late October 2016 that he was reopening the probe of Clinton's use of a private computer server after emails between Clinton and Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin — formerly Clinton's closest aide — were found on Weiner's laptop computer.
Two days before Election Day, the FBI declared there was nothing new in the emails. But in a recent interview, Clinton called Comey's intervention "the determining factor" in her defeat.
Abedin and Weiner are in divorce proceedings.
At sentencing in Manhattan federal court, Weiner attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown said his client likely exchanged thousands of messages with hundreds of women over the years and was communicating with up to 19 women when he encountered the teenager.
(© Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
