Weiner's definition is more defensible: If you don't meet in person, it isn't adultery.Throughout the press conference, Weiner stressed this point.But if the question is whether he cheated on his wife, the answer is no, because he never met these women, and he had only "communications" with them, not relationships. And it doesn't square with the emerging details of Weiner's online behavior.According to ABC News, Meagan Broussard, a 26-year-old woman armed with documentation, says the congressman "almost immediately" friended her on Facebook after she called one of his political videos "hottttt." They went on to exchange "hundreds of messages," many of which were sexual.Over the past few years, I have engaged in several inappropriate conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, email, and occasionally on the phone with women I had met online.I have exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years."I have never met any of these women or had physical relationships at any time," he declared in his opening statement.When a reporter asked whether he had ever had "phone sex" or an "affair" with any of the women, Weiner replied: "I never met any of these women. I never had any physical relationship whatsoever." Weiner depicted his online interactions as a kind of game disconnected from reality.
We have met them in the new sense, if not in the old one. When a reporter accused him of sexting complete strangers, the congressman replied: "I didn't have the sense that they were complete strangers.
If you watch the press conference on C-SPAN, about a minute and a half in, you'll hear it.
"For the most part," says Weiner, "these relaysh—these communications took place before my marriage." Rewind the video, and you can see what happened.
On some occasions, she recalls him asking, "What are you wearing? You know, in the bedroom…" In another message, he supposedly joked, "I am stalking you." Broussard also says Weiner phoned her and mentioned her daughter's name, which "kind of freaked me out because you had to pilfer through my Facebook to find out her name." And then there were the photos of his bare chest and thinly clothed erection.
In the annals of lust and sin, Weiner is just another straying husband.
