Anthony Weiner's career is never, ever coming back

“All right, let’s dial down the apocalypse. Let’s relax, everybody,” he’d say. “It’s going to be all right if we make some smart decisions.”

And then he'd throw some punches. He said he was “surprised at how relatively undisciplined the candidates were.” He watched Eric Adams meander through an attack on Andrew Yang and thought about what candidate Weiner would have said: “Are you from Philadelphia?”

He has also been surprised about how little heat the former aides to Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, have taken. “How come no one says, ‘Anyone who worked for that administration should have to shower for four years to clean this thing off.’”

He was also puzzled by how an unverified allegation against Scott Stringer derailed his campaign, and about the way the claim seemed to break out ahead of any attempt to verify it.

“This is not a thing I’m in any position to be commenting on,” Mr. Weiner said. But “that doesn’t feel right.” (He was speaking before Katie Glueck, of The New York Times, reported a second allegation on Friday.)

But Anthony Weiner, now 56, isn’t in politics any more. The barista at the third-floor cafe didn’t even recognize him. “I’d be really good as a campaign manager,” he said, but of course no politician would be caught dead even speaking to him. He said he had given some informal advice to mayoral campaigns, though, “I don’t talk about which ones, because it would hurt them.” They won’t even take his money.

Ten years ago Mr. Weiner was a new kind of public figure, a congressman who had become a national star in the hyperpartisan terrain of cable news, and who used social media fluently for authentic, direct connections with supporters and the media. My former colleague at BuzzFeed News Matt Berman called him the most important politician of the 2010s, a man who “helped create social media politics, fully embraced it, and was quickly swallowed by it.”

Then Mr. Weiner became a character out of a Philip Roth novel. His scandals all played out through digital media, driven by an inexplicable compulsion to exchange sexts with women who liked him for his politics.

He resigned from Congress in 2011 after conservative media, led by Andrew Breitbart, caught him at it. He was leading in the polls in 2013 when I brought him the news that a young woman in Indiana, Sydney Leathers, was sharing their explicit photos and messages, and his campaign fell apart as she literally pursued him around Manhattan, all under the watchful eye of a documentary crew.

He says that, even at the time, he knew in the back of his head that the 2013 campaign was doomed. “I was famous for being famous, and I was a candidate because I had been a candidate, and I had all this money from past campaigns,” he said. But, he said, he had “too many struggles, too much self-loathing.”

Lately, the news that Mr. Weiner said he has been following “with some interest” is the story of Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who is currently trying to brazen out allegations that he paid young women, possibly including an underage girl, for sex. Mr. Weiner said that people tell him all the time that, in 2011 and again in 2013, “you never should have quit.”

But the sort of media and social media storm he was in the middle of felt new then. “We didn’t know what we were working with at the time, and I was lying to everyone around me,” he said.

And after he left public life in 2013, he slipped from compulsion into crime, and the saga broadened from damage to his own life to the nation’s. In January 2016, he began exchanging explicit messages with a 15-year-old girl. After the texts were reported in September 2016, prosecutors seized his laptop computer. And then, 11 days before the presidential election, the F.B.I. director, James Comey, wrote a letter to Congress saying that new emails discovered on Mr. Weiner’s computer had prompted him to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Weeks later, as Democrats tried to understand how Donald J. Trump had been elected president, Mr. Weiner came in for some of the blame. He was the butterfly who flapped his, er, wings and led to the election of Mr. Trump. Mr. Weiner said he believes, in retrospect, that there were larger forces at play in that campaign and that if it hadn’t been the emails, Mr. Trump’s supporters would have seized on something else. And indeed, Trump-like figures have been elected all over the world. It wasn’t just Mr. Weiner.

But his own skepticism that he was the fatal butterfly “is complicated by the fact that that’s what Hillary thinks,” he said. (“I wouldn’t call it a net positive,” a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, told me.)

His life hit bottom in 2017, when he was sentenced to 21 months in prison for transferring obscene material to a minor. He served 15 months in a federal prison in Massachusetts, and three more in a Bronx halfway house. His compulsion destroyed his career and his marriage to Huma Abedin, a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton. And it has left him nearly unemployable, and officially labeled a sex offender.

Mr. Weiner has spent most of the last year running a Brooklyn company called IceStone, which makes environmentally sustainable countertops. He put in place a policy of offering job interviews to formerly incarcerated people. He’s now in the process of stepping down as chief executive, he said, to try to turn the company into a “worker-run cooperative.” He and Ms. Abedin, who still works for Mrs. Clinton, are finalizing their divorce, but they live down the hall from each other in the same apartment building. Mr. Weiner is in a 12-step program for sex addiction, and one of its conditions is that he not talk about it. His life, he said, largely revolves around their 9-year-old son.

Sometimes people tell him he should try to “change the narrative” about himself. But there’s no point. There’s no route back to public life for him. “‘The narrative’ implies you’re telling a story,” he said. “To what end?” The exception, he said, is that his agent has shopped a book about sex addiction, which he said he hoped could help other people in his position.

Mr. Weiner’s notoriety, and his sex offender status, will make it pretty hard for him to find another job. “It’s very narrow — the places that I can work without having The New York Post just make everyone’s life miserable,” he said.

But he said he has also been wondering whether he can parlay his notoriety into something new. People sometimes yell at him from passing cars (and on Twitter), “Where’s your laptop?!” The device, which is in his closet, was ultimately not found to contain anything incriminating about Mrs. Clinton. But it retains a certain infamy.

“I’m wondering if I should call up the MyPillow guy and offer to sell him the laptop,” he mused, referring to Mike Lindell, the bedding entrepreneur and Trump loyalist who has promoted wild theories about the Clintons.

He is thinking more seriously — really seriously — about the 2021 version of that transaction: getting into the booming business of digital collectibles, known as nonfungible tokens or NFTs, and starting with some of his own holdings.

“If you do believe in this butterfly effect, I’ve got the butterfly’s wings and its antennas,” he said. He could make an NFT, he said, of the errant tweet that began his long spiral in 2011. He could make an NFT of the search warrant for his laptop, or of the email his old friend, the comedian Jon Stewart, wrote to apologize for making fun of his troubles, or of the check that Mr. Trump wrote to one of his earlier campaigns.

“Cashing in would be nice,” he said. But he also wonders if he could make a career of it — “to sell my own stuff but also to create a new category that lets people buy and sell political collectibles as a form of political fund-raising and contributing.”

He's poison

It's too bad. He's was a street fighter. And that's what the Dems need right now.

(I was a little incredulous, but bounced the idea off a few cryptocurrency enthusiasts at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami this weekend. They liked the idea.)

And why not? It’s not really clear what else Anthony Weiner can do. We don’t live in a moment with much room for redemption — even if, like Mr. Weiner, you’ve served hard time for your sins. It’s hard to know what society wants from someone like him.

I* played my own small part in Mr. Weiner’s demise. After calling to tell him we’d identified Sydney Leathers, I edited the story that named her and helped end his mayoral campaign. Three weeks later, I interviewed Mr. Weiner onstage at a raucous bar in Chelsea. I asked him mischievously why he hadn’t used Snapchat for his sexting, so the messages would have disappeared. He winced; the audience laughed. In retrospect, I wince a little, too. The guy was obviously suffering, as the judge would later say at his sentencing, from “a very strong compulsion.” I asked him what he made of the lack of empathy he found in journalists like me when his life fell apart.

“Journalists, even in their best moments, are what their readers are and what their readers want. Any momentary thing — there’s got to be a lot of pressure on you to be writing it,” he said.

“I don’t know how you guys do it,” Mr. Weiner said, invoking the Yiddish word that can mean empathy or pity. “I have rachmones for you guys.”

(NOTE, the "I" is Ben Smith, the author of the piece and former Buzzfeed editor)

He's not visually very attractive and yet he reminds me of some of the scrappy tough guys from where I grew up......I still often feel a strange twinge of attraction toward him.

I think it's more his alphaness, not any aspect of the visuals.

To people who worked for him, Anthony Weiner was a joke long before the sex stuff came out. He was a grandstander with little substance. He couldn't work with others, he left nothing behind in congress. This "fighter" label many fell for is bullshit, loud is a better word. Weiner is very shallow and ego motivated, with the highest staff turn over of anyone in congress.

And yet we can elect a man to the presidency, who may run again, that hung out with Jeffrey Epstein the sex trafficker.

R9, exactly. Compared to Trump, Weiner looks like a choir boy. I don't think we need him back in politics, but if he were a Republican, the GOP would celebrate his return.

Different people support both guys r9. The Trumpsters won't hear of Trump's links to Epstein and will make up lies and bizarre theories to explain it away. Being a terrible human being seems to be a plus for the GOP these days. Meanwhile Democrats don't just blindly excuse Weiner for what he's done out of misguided loyalty, they recognize he's done bad things, that he's too troubled and too much of a problem to be part of the party anymore.

[quote]Mr. Weiner said, invoking the Yiddish word that can mean empathy or pity. “I have rachmones for you guys.”

Wrong! Rachmunes (ראַכמאָנעס) from the Hebrew רחמנות means compassion, not empathy or pity.

He has rachmones.

[quote] they recognize he's done bad things, that he's too troubled and too much of a problem to be part of the party anymore.

Translation: Another Jew scapegoat (like Frankin) the Dems can use to show their hypocritical "purity" and salve their bigoted consciences.

R14, what was done to Franklin was an injustice, but don't defend this guy. And you must be Matt for thinking it has anything to do with being Jewish. For fuck sake.

R15 You mean Frankin was the Jew scapegoat and Weiner not? And how would you know the difference with Jew hatred so culturally entrenched in the US as to be unrecognized and acceptable?

R15 Especially by someone who thinks that the only person who would speak up for Jews is another Jew?

I think if he were a little better looking, he might have a chance. But, his face slides too much toward pervert.

Didn’t we already know this?

Yes, because Anthony Weiner was a pure and innocent man Dreyfussed into resignation by evil Anti-Semitic America.

"It's too bad. He's was a street fighter. And that's what the Dems need right now"

And dats vhy ve set thirst trap for hims!

[quote]Anthony Weiner was scapegoated into resignation by Anti-Semitic, hypocritical Democratic Party. Just like Frankin.

R18 if he was just 10% more handsome or hung another inch or so- he would’ve gotten away with it.

He looks like a pervert.

He really was a transformative politician. He would have been a fantastic mayor and eventually senator. A true shame.

It is interesting that as far as sex scandals go, it’s the Jews in front in number and size of scandal with Epstein and Weinstein leading the pack. Lesser violators, Weiner and the as yet unproven Dershowitz. There is also the on going Woody Allen accusations.

The Black folks have Cosby and a seemingly never ending list of sex offending pro athletes.

Unsurprisingly basic white men are pure as the driven snow with any mere whiff of scandal or perversion quickly rushed out of the news cycle.

Franklin? What does Aretha Franklin have to do with any of this?

R3 CEO of a company? What does Anthony Weiner know about running a company? Does he have a bus degree? Experience?

No r27 but CEO’s believe they make better politicians so why not politicians making stellar CEO’s?

He's got a great dick and I loved his fearless attacks on the GOP.

I'd suck him off.

I just think he'd be a dirty talker and really loud as he filled my mouth with his load

R25 sounds like one of those specimens who say that it’s really white people committing all the violent crime in America, but via an evil conspiracy only black violent criminals are incarcerated.

R8 is right about Weiner. Forgot about his dick or his Jewishness — he was good at nothing but promoting Weiner.

I believe the expose about him was published in the Voice or New York Magazine. Some political reporter looked beyond the buzz and saw nothing but a grandstander who couldn’t actually get laws passed and didn’t care to try.

It's Franken! Not Frankin or Franklin. Al Franken!

Not to be confused with Steve Franken, who was Chatsworth Osbourne Jr. on The Dobie Gillis Show, with a number of lesbians (as his mother and as Zelda Gilroy) and Gilligan before his Island.

r24 The only thing transformative about Weiner was that he was ahead of the curve as a "Television congressman". He didn't do much as a congressman but he was terrific on TV and spent most of his focus there.

Today we have types like Madison Cawthorn, who decided not to employ staff to write legislation since, why bother? to him, media is where the power is at and nobody cares about a freshman congressman's legislation anyway.

R32 But you never EVER forget that Weiner is a Jew. He's one of your "foreign agent Jews". He's a "Zionist". Right, Scumdrip?

R14 Frakin but his hands on a womans tits without consent. How is that okay?

I’ve met a few members of Congress. When I first met Weiner, one on one, he was soon to be elected.

What’s stayed with me is that the only other “straight” members of Congress who so strongly triggered my gaydar on first meeting were Eric Cantor and Aaron Schock. (By comparison, Barney Frank, initially, was a Kinsey four.)

I put it out of my mind when I later heard he was getting married. Then heard unproven rumors about Huma . . .

Creepy as fuck!

R37 Why is destroying a man's career/life without due process "OK"?

[quote] Not to be confused with Steve Franken

Al and Steve were second cousins.

Were Franken’s hands actually touching that woman? I thought they were hovering, and that she was awake an in on the joke…

His hands were hovering, but she was asleep. It really was a jerky thing to do, but in my opinion just shy of sexual assault since he didn't touch her. Harassment, definitely, especially with a picture being taken to be passed around and laughed about.

Then other women started coming forward claiming to have been groped and/or forcibly kissed by Franken, which I think was really the nail in his coffin. If there had just been one isolated incident...but there were more.

That's fine. He's too ugly to forgive.

I remember when the Weiner scandal hit & wondering how THAT guy got to be an elected representative; pervy & weird as Weiner is, he's an amateur compared to Gaetz and his ilk

There are all these guys who grew up in the NY metro area who are really alpha and great at fighting and have huge egos--Weiner, Scott Rudin, Andrew Cuomo, Harvey Weinstein, Rudy Giuliani, etc. And the same things that make them successful in a certain field end up destroying them because they cannot rein their egos and their hyperaggressiveness in. They usually have sex scandals or abuse scandals.

Alan Dershowitz, who has destroyed his legacy but has not yet destroyed his career, also belongs in this camp.

Leeann Tweeden is the name of the woman that made accusations against Franken. They knew each other well and had done USO shows together. In the controversial picture Leeann is dressed in Army fatigues and helmet, Leeann wasn’t a soldier, she was dressed that way for publicity.

There used to be videos of Tweeden on stage with Franken doing their USO act. In that act Tweeden was openly flirtatious and aggressive with the soldiers and with others up in the stage with her. Similar to comedic woman like May West. But I can’t find those videos on YouTube anymore.

Forgot to mention, Leeann Tweeden is a Republican.

Those women who complained about Franken were all lying whores. It was a smear job.

(And for nothing, the seat is still Dem)

If anyone deserves a political resurrection, it's Eliott Spitzer.

God, he's so 2009. Can we leave him in the 2010s and give someone else a chance?

R40 The creepy inappropriate pictures particularly the one that included his child and the sick narcissism of peddling his junk and the irony of his name made him a pariah. He did it to himself.

[quote] [R32] But you never EVER forget that Weiner is a Jew. He's one of your "foreign agent Jews". He's a "Zionist". Right, Scumdrip?

Ugly Anscher likes to tell people how they feel about Jews.