U.S.
New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner said Tuesday he will not quit the race despite a newly revealed correspondence with a young woman -- an exchange she says began months after he resigned from Congress for similar behavior.
"This is entirely behind me," Weiner told a news conference, just hours after he confirmed exchanging sexually explicit photos and text messages with a woman online.
Weiner resigned his Congressional seat in June 2011 after acknowledging sexual conversations with at least a half-dozen women.
At Tuesday's news conference, the 48-year-old Weiner acknowledged some of the newly revealed activity took place after he resigned. He repeated that he put such behavior behind him before deciding to run for mayor.
"I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out and today they have," Weiner said in a statement issued by his campaign earlier in the day.
His wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, made rare public comments on her husband's behavior.
"I love him. I have forgiven him. And as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward," Abedin said. She acknowledged that Weiner "made some horrible mistakes."
Abedin was pregnant when the sexting scandal broke in 2011 and gave birth months later.
The latest revelations were posted Monday by the gossip website The Dirty. The woman on the receiving end of the explicit photos and messages told the site that her online relationship with Weiner began in July 2012, when she was 22, and lasted for six months.
The website BuzzFeed said Tuesday evening that it had identified the woman, who disclosed the new revelations about Weiner to The Dirty, as a progressive activist. BuzzFeed did so by matching up profile pictures from Facebook and Formspring that were blurred on The Dirty's website with the original, unblurred images on social networking sites.
The woman said Weiner used the alias "Carlos Danger" for their exchanges, but she knew she was talking to the former representative. She also said she and Weiner exchanged nude photos of themselves and engaged in frequent phone sex. The Dirty ran a pixelated photo of what appears to be a man's genitals.
The woman involved said Weiner later asked her to destroy the evidence of their chats. She insisted that she never had sex with Weiner or received any payment from him.
Since re-entering public life this spring, Weiner has apologized repeatedly for his behavior. He has been near the top of most mayoral opinion polls conducted over the last few months.
The newest reveletations could severely test voters' willingness to forgive Weiner, who has said he spent the two years since the scandal trying to make things right with his wife and earn redemption.
The New York Times, the New York Daily News and some of Weiner's mayoral opponents, including Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and former City Councilman Sal Albanese, both Democrats, and billionaire John Catsimatidis, a Republican, called on him to drop out of the race.
"Enough is enough," de Blasio said.
Another Democratic mayoral hopeful, current City Comptroller John Liu, stopped short of calling for Weiner to bow out but suggested his "propensity for pornographic selfies is a valid issue for voters."
The other leading Democratic candidates, including City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and former City Comptroller Bill Thompson, did not immediately comment.
"The serially evasive" Weiner "should take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City," the New York Times said in an editorial posted online Tuesday.
In an editorial Wednesday, the New York Daily News said: "He is not fit to lead America's premier city. Lacking the dignity and discipline that New York deserves in a mayor, Weiner must recognize that his demons have no place in City Hall."
Al Jazeera and wire services
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