Huma Abedin: 5 things we learned from the former Hillary Clinton aide’s memoir

She arrived in “Hillaryland” during the Lewinsky scandal. She was sexually assaulted by a US senator. She blamed the breakdown of her own marriage for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss.

The memoir of Huma Abedin - a former aide to Hillary Clinton and ex-wife of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner - was published this week and it is packed with bombshells, from the moment she learnt of Weiner’s sex scandal to the reason her boss stayed with Bill Clinton following his affair with an intern.

The book is called “Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds” and tells the story of Abedin’s time working for Clinton, from joining her campaign in August 1998 - the same day President Bill Clinton told a jury about his inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky - to becoming one of Hillary’s closest aides.

After 25 years in the shadows, the 45-year-old says she is ready to tell her story. Here are five things we learnt from her bombshell tell-all.

She was sexually assaulted by an unnamed US senator

When Clinton was in her first term as a Democratic senator, Abedin was invited to have coffee with a male senator. “Once inside, he told me to make myself comfortable on the couch. I watched him take off his blazer and roll up his white shirt sleeves,” she writes. “It was like any other day on the Hill.”

Then “in an instant”, the tone changed. “He plopped down to my right, put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa. I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last ten seconds to be erased. He seemed genuinely surprised that I was rebuffing him and immediately apologized that he had ‘misread’ me all this time.”

She added: “Then I said something only the twentysomething version of me would have come up with - ‘I am so sorry’ - and walked out, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible.”

Despite being “shocked” and pushing the senator away, Abedin says she did not consider the incident to be sexual assault - more an “uncomfortable situation” - and she still refuses to name him.

“In my own personal opinion, no, did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment? I didn’t, it didn’t feel that way,” she writes. “It felt like I needed to extricate myself from the situation. And he also spent a lot of time apologizing and making sure I was OK and we were actually able to rebalance our relationship.”

She says she “buried” the incident for years but was triggered by the appointment of US Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assaulting professor Christine Blasey Ford when the pair were both teenagers.

The first clue of her husband’s sexting scandal came to light on holiday

In 2011, Weiner shared a photo of himself in his underwear on Twitter that he had meant to send to another woman. He made headlines again two years later, after sending explicit photos to a second woman. Then in 2016, a picture of Weiner in bed with his and Abedin’s young son was leaked.

The third image triggered an investigation by Child Protective Services (he was also caught sexting an underage girl), but Abedin says the first clue came years earlier, on a trip to the Dominican Republic when they were engaged.

“I noticed an unread email from a woman whose name I did not recognize,” she writes, remembering the moment she borrowed his BlackBerry to call her family on New Year’s Eve. “I felt a hot rush of blood from my head down to my fingertips. The message was fawning, flirtatious and very familiar, as though this was a woman Anthony knew.” When she quizzed him on it, “he said, in an entirely composed manner, ‘Oh, that’s nothing. Just a fan.’”

For Abedin, with hindsight, this moment marked the beginning of the end. “I didn’t know a seed was being planted in his psyche that would grow into something much darker and uncontrollable, something that would ruin us,” she writes. “I was in the midst of what I believed to be a deep, true love affair. Nothing in my experience could possibly have prepared me for what was to come.”

The final straw for leaving Weiner was seeing her son in one of his sexts

For Abedin, the nail in the coffin of her failing marriage was when a picture surfaced in August 2016. “There was Jordan [their son], sleeping peacefully next to an indecent Anthony, an image shared with a stranger, or a ‘friend’ in Anthony’s view,” she writes, saying she can “never erase” that image from her head.

“This crossed into another level of degradation, a violation of the innocence of our child. There were no more ‘what were you thinking?’ questions left in me. It was over.”

Children’s services went on to interview Abedin’s son and revealed that she had been named “in a report of suspected child abuse or maltreatment”. After a lengthy investigation in which further allegations surfaced and Weiner was diagnosed with sex addiction, Abedin was given full custody of her son. “HRC had lost the election,” she writes. “My consolation prize was that I would be allowed to keep my child.”

She has slowly come to accept she’s not to blame for Hillary’s election loss

Weiner’s laptop was seized by the FBI less than two weeks before the 2016 US presidential election and it was Weiner’s illicit text messages to a 15-year-old girl that sparked FBI director James Comey’s decision to reopen his investigation into Clinton’s emails.

Abedin says she spent years believing it was these incidents that were at the root of Clinton’s loss. “‘Anthony,’ I said, wanting to shake him through the phone, ‘if [Hillary] loses this election, it will be because of you and me,’” she writes, adding: “This man was going to ruin me, and now he was going to jeopardize HRC’s chances of winning the presidency, which would leave our country in the hands of someone dangerously unfit for office.”

Since then, Abedin says she’s come to realise her marriage breakdown wasn’t to blame for Donald Trump’s victory - it is “more a sense of an ache in my heart” now. “For a long time, Comey was a daily nightmare for me, and even now the thought of what he did sometimes creeps in to torture me,” she writes. “But I have slowly come to accept that I am not the sole cause of the 2016 election loss.”

Instead, she blames Comey. “One man’s decision to play God forever changed the course of history,” she continues. “It should not be my burden to carry the rest of my life. It should be his.”

She believes Hillary stayed with Bill because it was “right for herself, her family and her country”

Abedin’s doesn’t seek to disguise her admiration for former boss Hillary Clinton in the memoir. There isn’t a bad word about the 2016 Presidential nominee in the book and Clinton reportedly sees Abedin as a second daughter.

“It helps to have someone in your life you can turn to for solid advice, candid insights and discretion,” Abedin writes in Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds. “In my case it just happened to be Hillary Clinton.”

Abedin says she would “walk to the ends of the earth” for Clinton and has defended her former boss’ decision to stay with her husband Bill following the Lewinsky scandal. “She made the decision that she thought was right for herself, her family, and her country,” Abedin says.

Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, Simon & Schuster, £20