Metro

Anthony Weiner gets hard time

Anthony Weiner got a stiff dose of reality Monday as a judge slapped him with a nearly two-year sentence for sexting with a 15-year-old girl — a heinous crime that cost him both his marriage and his freedom.

Manhattan federal Judge Denise Cote rejected defense pleas to spare Weiner any time behind bars and instead ordered him to spend 21 months in a federal penitentiary, saying she needed to make an example of the high-profile pervert.

Weiner, who had faced up to ten years in prison, hung his head in shame, covered his face and cried silently into his hands.

He broke down a second time at the end of the hearing, as his lawyers tried to comfort him by patting his back. His mom, Frances, wept in the gallery, where she sat with Weiner’s dad, Morton, and his brother, Jason.





Weiner didn’t stop crying until after court officers had cleared the room.

Weiner, 53, had begged the judge for probation so he could continue recovering from his longtime sex addiction and “be a good father to my son.”

The serial sexter struggled with his emotions as soon as he started reading a prepared statement in which he described reaching a new low by getting involved online with the underage North Carolina teen.

According to the feds, Weiner sent her “adult pornography” and repeatedly convinced her to strip naked and fondle herself while he watched via Skype and Snapchat in February and March 2016.

“Your Honor, the crime I committed was my rock bottom, but I am truly grateful that it finally began me on my recovery,” Weiner said.





“I was a very sick man for a very long time, but I’m also responsible for the damage I have done. Your Honor, I have a disease, but I have no excuse.”

Weiner said he was “profoundly sorry to the victim” and obliquely referenced the previous sexting scandals that forced him from Congress in 2011 and torpedoed his 2013 comeback bid for New York City mayor.

Weiner — who wore his wedding band — also said he had “betrayed” his long-suffering wife, Huma Abedin. She filed for divorce immediately after Weiner’s arrest, and called her an “amazing mother” to their 5-year-old son.

“I have trouble talking about him without tears,” Weiner said.

“Jordan has been my salvation, the one perfect thing in my life. I always told myself, if I get that one thing right, all else would be forgiven.”





In a bizarre bid for leniency, defense lawyer Arlo Devlin-Brown revealed that Weiner “was in contact with as many as 19 other adult women” at the time he was communicating with the underage girl.

But Cote, while acknowledging that Weiner was “finally receiving treatment,” said he was struggling with a compulsion strong enough that “despite two very public disclosures and the destruction of his career on two occasions, he continued with the activity.”

Cote also said it was “very important” that Weiner’s punishment for transfer of obscene materials to a minor should serve as a warning to anyone else considering similar, illicit online activities.

“Because of the defendant’s notoriety, gained well before he engaged in this criminal activity, there is intense interest in this prosecution, in his plea, and his sentence, and so there is the opportunity to make a statement that could protect other minors,” she said.





“General deterrence is a very significant factor in this sentence.”

In addition to his prison term — which could be cut to 18 months with time off for good behavior — Weiner was ordered to spend three years on supervised release afterward, pay a $10,000 fine and register as a sex offender.

Cote gave Weiner until Nov. 6 to report to prison and ordered that he forfeit an iPhone he used to communicate with the girl, who sent a letter to the judge that she ordered sealed, along with other letters from the girl’s father and grandmother.

Weiner’s sexting with the teen didn’t only finally destroy his marriage and get him locked up, but it also helped rock the closing days of last year’s presidential election, when feds searching his laptop found emails between Abedin and longtime boss Hillary Clinton.

The discovery led then-FBI Director James Comey to re-open a probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, only to announce two days before Election Day that nothing new had been found.

Clinton has called Comey’s actions “the determining factor” in her unexpected defeat by President Trump.

Devlin-Brown also repeatedly described Weiner as having suffered from a sickness he called “indisputable” in light of Weiner’s repeated acts of self-destruction and “years of denial.”

The lawyer called it “stunning” that Weiner never realized he had a serious problem despite having “thrown away his congressional career” and a lead in the Democratic mayoral primary when “the voters found out that…he had continued with the same conduct.”

“In America they say there are second acts, but there are no third acts, and after that Anthony was finished,” his lawyer said.

“And yet even though his career had been ruined, he continued doing the same thing again and again.”

Left unmentioned was another scandal in which The Post last year revealed how Weiner sent a woman a lewd selfie that showed his son lying on the bed next to him, with Weiner clearly displaying a bulge in his underpants.

Prosecutor Amanda Kramer argued that Weiner had a history “that simply cannot be ignored” and needed between 21 and 27 months in custody “to fully pierce his denial” and “specifically deter the defendant from re-offending.”

“Something more and different is required, beyond personal and professional consequences, beyond the collateral consequences that he has faced before, beyond the scrutiny of the public, all of which have failed to sufficiently deter him in the past,” Kramer said.

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