Sydney Leathers, the alleged virtual mistress of New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, gave her first interview with CBS’s Inside Edition.
In the interview Sydney Leathers, 23, cried as she apologized to Anthony Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin “for the pain she probably feels” but says she thought the political power couple had “more of an arrangement, or a business relationship, than a marriage”.
Sydney Leathers hypothesizes that Huma Abedin’s own ambitions may have played a role in her staying with the mayoral candidate after his texting scandal in 2011.
“I do think that was probably part of it, for the power, for the fame, for the stature,” Sydney Leathers said.
The renewed discussion about Anthony Weiner’s recent indiscretions was prompted by Sydney Leather’s decision to release screen grabs of their conversations to gossip site The Dirty as well as pictures of the mayoral candidate, all of which were exchanged more than one year after he resigned from Congress.
Sydney Leathers first contacted Anthony Weiner in her role as a political blogger, right after the previous texting scandal, to lambast him for his actions.
Anthony Weiner never responded to the message, and it wasn’t until a year later that they finally contacted, “poking” each other on a social networking site.
From there, their relationship turned dirty, escalating to phone s** sessions twice a week from June to November 2012.
Sydney Leathers called the affair “dark and dirty” and that new-father Anthony Weiner was using their online trysts as a way of “acting out”.
But she also said that they truly loved each other, and that Anthony Weiner even offered to buy the Indiana-based Sydney Leathers an apartment in Chicago so they could spend time together when he was in town.
“I’ve found the perfect woman. Gorgeous, s**y and like a bit crazy,” Anthony Weiner wrote in one exchange.
“I think it was a fantasy thing for both of us,” she said.
Anthony Weiner even got jealous of her other online relationships.
“Me being hit on by other men really upset him,” Sydney Leathers said.
“We were Facebook friends, so he could see if men were commenting on photos of me, or telling me that I was pretty.
“Really minor things like that really bothered him.”
Their relationship took a turn for the worse in the lead up to the New York City mayoral race, when Anthony Weiner contacted Sydney Leathers and asked her delete their conversations.
“Do me a solid,” Anthony Weiner texted Sydney Leathers four months ago.
“Can you hard delete all our chats here.”
“Obviously I knew that he wanted me to erase any evidence of out conversations,” Sydney Leathers said.
“Because that was around the time I knew that he was going to run for mayor.”
For Sydney Leathers, things turned scary when a man claiming to be Anthony Weiner’s “brother” contacted her “to see if she was going to be a problem”.
Anthony Weiner’s brother Jason denies any contact with Sydney Leathers, but a Facebook message from Weiner to Leathers asks her if they’re “ok” after a conversation with his brother.
“My brother e-mailed me asking about you and whether I pissed you off. he told me to look at your feed, but nothing seems about me. maybe he was just tallying up pro and con comments and took one of your pithy posts as being something bad about me,” Anthony Weiner wrote.
In the interview, Sydney Leathers said she had initially been attracted to Anthony Weiner because of his politics, but had since seen another side to him.
“He’s not who I thought he was,” she said.
When asked what she would like to say to him now, Sydney Leathers responded: “Stop lying, stop embarrassing his wife, and get help.”
Sydney Leathers was spotted out on Thursday for the first time since disclosing the mayoral candidates indiscretions. She wore an eye-catching blue dress and towering wedge heels as she grabbed coffee in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Laughing as she chatted on the phone and visited Starbucks, she seemed unfazed by the political storm created by her revelations of her six-month virtual affair with the married politician.
The Inside Edition interview came as her high school friends described her as someone who was always desperate for fame just as it emerged she had got herself an agent and was hoping to make $100,000 by selling her story.
Sydney Leathers hoped Anthony Weiner would be her ticket out of “Conservative Hell” Indiana and alleges he promised to put her up in a condo in Chicago and a possible job at Politico, they said.
She lives with her machinist father in Princeton and had a difficult relationship with her thrice-married mother since they split six years ago.
Since the revelations, Anthony Weiner has admitted that he started three different virtual relationships with women after he resigned from Congress following his Twitter texting scandal in 2011.
And earlier this week, Anthony Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin held a joint press conference declaring their dedication to both one another and the campaign.
Afterwards, Anthony Weiner sent an email to supporters saying that the bid for New York City’s mayor was “too important” to give up over “embarrassing personal things”.
Rivals, newspaper editorial pages and former New York congressional colleagues urged Democrat Anthony Weiner to quit after he acknowledged exchanging raunchy messages and photos online after he had resigned from Congress for similar behavior.
Anthony Weiner’s strongest rivals in the polls, Christine Quinn and Bill Thompson, criticized him but didn’t directly call on him to quit.
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