By Tom LoBianco and Dan Merica
WASHINGTON — (CNN) Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin announced Monday that she and former US Rep. Anthony Weiner are separating after new reports surfaced that he sent sexually suggestive photos again.
“After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband. Anthony and I remain devoted to doing what is best for our son, who is the light of our life. During this difficult time, I ask for respect for our privacy,” Abedin said in a statement Monday.
Weiner, who torpedoed his own political career five years ago with a sexting scandal and whose wife is Hillary Clinton’s closest adviser, deleted his Twitter account after the latest report surfaced.
A Donald Trump supporter told the New York Post that the two of them exchanged racy photos over the course of about a year, including one exchange where she alleges that he sexted her with his son apparently sleeping next to him.
“Someone just climbed into my bed,” Weiner allegedly wrote in a message, sent July 31, 2015, according to the Post.
He then is alleged to have sent a picture of a barechested man with white boxers and a bulge, while a small child is asleep beside him.
“Your do realize you can see you(r) Weiner in that pic??” the woman replied, according to the Post.
CNN has reached out to Weiner for comment.
Photos published by The New York Post late Sunday show the man completely and others feature Weiner’s face, but the photo of the boy has been partially blurred out, and the woman’s face is blurred out in her photos.
The Post, which did not completely identify the woman, said she provided 12 selfies from Weiner. The paper described her as a 40-something divorcee from the West.
Weiner is married to Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide since the 1990s. Weiner and Abedin’s relationship is scrutinized during a recent documentary on his unsuccessful 2013 bid for a political comeback during the New York City mayoral primary.
He resigned from Congress in 2011 after he accidentally posted a lewd photo of himself on his Twitter account. In the midst of Weiner’s first sexting scandal, it became known that his wife was expecting their first child.
Two years later he was caught again, sexting with an aspiring porn star from southwest Indiana named Sydney Leathers. During his run for mayor, Weiner, had adopted the online pseudonym “Carlos Danger.
As of about 7:35 a.m. ET, Weiner’s Twitter page had been taken down.
Weiner is alleged, in a separate New York Post article, to have been baited last month into a racy online chat with a Republican operative he thought was a young woman.
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