Former New York congressman and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner pleaded guilty last Friday to sexting, or transferring obscene material to a child, in this case a 15-year-old girl from North Carolina. Weiner now faces a prison sentence of between 21 and 27 months, will be registered as a sex offender and must surrender his iPhone to authorities.
Following his confession, Weiner got more bad news when his wife of nearly seven years, Huma Abedin, and mother to their five-year-old son filed for divorce. Abedin has also been in the national spotlight during the presidential campaign. As a top aide to Hillary Clinton during last year’s election, Abedin was under investigation by then FBI-director James Comey for sharing potentially top secret emails with Weiner.
Law professionals have begun to speculate as to how this will affect a potential child custody battle down the road. Considering the severity of the charges, obtaining child custody rights will be incredibly difficult and there is a significant question whether Weiner will even get visitation rights upon his release from prison. “He’ll be lucky if he gets supervised visits,” a top divorce attorney said.
This sad and dangerous tale should serve as a reminder that actions matter and could affect your family life down the road. If you are in the process of a divorce and your soon to be ex-spouse has a criminal history, that information could potentially be used in the courts to affect their decisions about child custody and other family law decisions.
Source: New York Daily News, “Anthony Weiner coming clean about sexting teen spells doom for child custody battle,” by Dale W. Eisenger, Nancy Dillon, Larry McShane, May 20, 2017
