On Wednesday night, attorneys for Anthony Weiner asked a New York judge to spare the former congressman from prison after he pleaded guilty to sexting an underage girl. In a memo to the court, Weiner’s lawyers argued that he has made “remarkable progress” over the past year — and revealed just how extensive his sexting roster was during his marriage to longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Just before the presidential election, former FBI director James Comey announced the bureau was investigating new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server that were uncovered during a probe into claims Weiner, 53, had been sexting with a 15-year-old girl. Weiner ended up pleading guilty in May to one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor and agreed to register as a sex offender. As the New York Times reports, prosecutors asked that Weiner serve 21 to 27 months in prison.
Weiner first came under fire for lewd communications with women in 2011, after he accidentally tweeted an explicit picture of himself and resigned from Congress that June. In the years since, he’s admitted to sexting with several women (including the aforementioned minor). However, the new memo provides even more insight into Weiner’s behavior. Per the Times:
The lawyers said that from 2009 through September 2016, Mr. Weiner exchanged texts and messages online with hundreds of women of varying ages. Almost always these women came to him, and not all of the conversations were of a sexual nature, they added.
On top of that, the memo states that Weiner exchanged more than 1,500 messages with “just one middle-aged woman” over the course of two months in early 2016, according to the Times. And in the first three months of 2016, he had “explicit communications” with at least 19 adult women.
His attorneys argue in the memo that Weiner was diagnosed with “mixed personality disorder, likely stemming from childhood emotional trauma,” which resulted in sex addiction and other addictive behavior. They wrote that he underwent an intensive inpatient treatment and has been “vigilant” with his therapy ever since.
“A term of imprisonment would bring Anthony’s indisputably successful treatment for the sickness underlying his crime to an immediate and complete halt,” the memo reads.
Weiner is set to be sentenced during a September 25 hearing.