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May 27: A Date That Will Live in Hilarity

Posted on | May 27, 2025 | Comments Off on May 27: A Date That Will Live in Hilarity

Anthony Weiner — hacking victim?

Big hat-tip to Ace of Spades for reminding us that it was on this date — May 27, 2011 — that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) used his official Twitter account to send a photo of his . . . pelvic bulge, and then claimed that his account had been hacked. Wikipedia:

On May 27, 2011, Weiner used his public Twitter account to send a link to a photo on yfrog. The picture of his erect penis concealed by boxer briefs[ was sent to a 21-year-old female college student from Seattle, Washington, who was following his posts on the social media website.[8] Though the link was quickly removed from Weiner’s Twitter account, screen shots of Weiner’s original message and of the photo were captured by a user identified as “Dan Wolfe” on Twitter and subsequently sent to blogger Andrew Breitbart who published them on his BigGovernment website the following day. CNN described it as a “lewd photograph” of a “man bulge in … underwear”.
On June 1, 2011, Weiner gave a series of interviews in which he denied sending the photo and suggested that someone, perhaps a political opponent, had hacked into his accounts and published the photo.

Memories light the corners of my mind . . .

Yeah, I don’t need Wikipedia to tell me how that went down, because I was living through it every minute, starting on May 28, and continuing through dozens of blog posts up until Weiner resigned June 16.

Of course, working in “file-it-and-forget-it” mode, as is my habit, the details had blurred in my memory. Like, I’d completely forgotten the name Gennette Nicole Cordova, the Seattle-area student who was the intended recipient of Weiner’s crotch photo. In hindsight, obviously, we know what happened — Weiner meant to send her that photo as a DM, but somehow fat-fingered it, so that instead it was a public tweet.

At the time — the fateful tweet went out late at night on the Friday before Memorial Day that year — I was trying to figure out if there could be some kind of innocent explanation, for example, the possibility that one of Weiner’s staffers, with access to his account, had accidentally sent the photo. And I remember calling up Andrew Breitbart to discuss this with him. Andrew’s response was blunt: “No, Stacy. Trust me — there’s more.”

What I didn’t know at that time was that, about a week earlier, someone had sent an email to Breitbart’s tip line, saying that they had also received lewd photos from Weiner. That email was from a woman who lived in Texas, and after the “Weinergate” story broke on May 27, Breitbart went back and saw this email, and reached out to the woman. Unfortunately, she had gone off on a long weekend camping trip — completely out of touch — so they could not immediately get confirmation. In other words, Breitbart and his team knew for a fact that Gennette Cordova wasn’t the only woman Weiner had been “sexting” with, but until the Texas woman returned from her camping trip, they couldn’t prove it. So there were several days of uncertainty, during which time Democrats sought to defend Weiner by demonizing Breitbart. Oh, it was crazy!

June 6, 2011 — the Weinergate avalanche

June 6 was the big breakthrough, when the Texas woman, an Army veteran and single mom named Meagan Broussard, told her story on Breitbart’s site. The same day, Anthony Weiner announced a press conference in New York. Weiner was late to the press conference, but Andrew Breitbart was there on time, so the assembled media demanded that Breitbart answer questions — upstaging the congressman:

 

The vindication of a genius, is what it was. When Weiner finally spoke at that June 6 press conference, he defended himself by saying that while his behavior was “inappropriate,” it was “consensual,” and he insisted that he would not be resigning. So then we had another 10 days of it — Democrats trying to see if they could leverage their media allies to spin the “rising star” congressman out of his jam, until at last they were compelled to admit it was hopeless, and he resigned June 16.

That very day, it so happened, I had to fly out of Dulles Airport to Minneapolis for the Right Online conference, and guess who I found “holding court” in the lobby of the Minneapolis Hilton?

 

Good times, my friends. Andrew died less than a year later, and it was an irreparable loss. There has never been anyone like him, and he was at the absolute peak of his fame then. All we have left are memories.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE II: By the way, it was past 2 a.m. when I conducted that brief video interview with Andrew Breitbart in the lobby of the Minneapolis Hilton. While I was flying to Minneapolis, Weiner was announcing his resignation, so as soon as I got to the hotel, I started blazing away on my column for the American Spectator:

By the time Weiner gave his resignation speech Thursday in New York, he was such a pariah that even his political mentor, Sen. Charles Schumer, would not even speak publicly in his defense, instead issuing a brief statement wishing Weiner well. . . .
[T]he digital images that defined the scandal known as WeinerGate left little to the imagination. There was also a transcript of Weiner’s sexually explicit Facebook exchanges with Las Vegas blackjack dealer Lisa Weiss, and the fact that Weiner’s Twitter correspondents included both a blonde porn star and a 17-year-old high school girl with a penchant for freely employing the F-word in her online communications.
In retrospect, it is possible to see Friday, June 11, as the day on which it became clear that Weiner was doomed. The scandal had begun two weeks earlier — late on the evening of Friday, May 27 — when Weiner sent a lewd photo of his crotch as a Twitter message addressed to a 21-year-old college student from Seattle. While Weiner first attempted to explain this as the work of “hackers” or a “prank,” further revelations forced the congressman to call a June 6 press conference where he admitted the truth: He had meant to send that photo as a private message and by a simple error had sent it publicly to the more than 40,000 people following his Twitter account. At that press conference, Weiner confessed to having carried on a half-dozen “online relationships” with women, but vowed he would not resign.
That vow became non-operational June 11, when police in Delaware showed up at the home of Weiner’s teenage Twitter correspondent. Although police said they found no evidence of criminality, and Weiner said there was nothing “indecent” in his private Twitter exchanges with the teen, the very fact that he had been in communication with her was disturbing. In light of what was already known about Weiner’s other “online relationships,” talking dirty and sending pictures of his penis to women he’d never met, for him to have a 17-year-old among his Internet contacts… well, it just looked bad. Within 24 hours, three top Democrats — including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, both of whom had previously defended Weiner — called for his resignation. . . .

You can read the rest of that, in case you’d forgotten. But it explains why, when I began recording that interview with Andrew, he asked, “Did you hit your deadline?” Yeah, man, I sure did.



 

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