Buzzfeed has published an open letter by the 15-year-old girl who was receiving sexual texts and pictures from Anthony Weiner earlier this year. In the letter, the girl blames FBI Director Comey for, among other things, not waiting until after the election to notify Congress about the emails discovered on Weiner’s laptop. Here’s a sample of the letter to Comey which is dated today:
I am the 15-year-old (now 16) who was the victim of Anthony Weiner. I now add you to the list of people who have victimized me. I told my story originally to protect other young girls that might be a victim of online predators.
Your letter to Congress has now brought this whole matter back into the media spotlight. Not even 10 minutes after being forensically interviewed with the FBI for seven hours, I received a phone call from a REPORTER asking for a statement. Why didn’t you communicate with the local FBI agents that I had just spoken to? They could have scheduled our interview sooner or scheduled a time to interview me later, or change locations of the interview. My neighborhood has been canvassed by reporters asking for details about me.
In your letter, you chose to use a vague approach, meaning the media had to keep searching to try and find out what evidence you had uncovered and how. Every media outlet from local to national has contacted me and my family to get my “story.” Why couldn’t your letter have waited until after the election, so I would not have to be the center of attention the last week of the election cycle?
It’s not clear how the FBI Director is responsible for the prying of media outlets or what that has to do with the timing of the girl’s interview by the FBI, but she is clearly blaming everything on Comey. In a separate Buzzfeed interview the girl says her story has become “political propaganda.”
“The FBI asked for me to speak to the media as little as possible. I have tried to stay quiet, but Comey has upset me,” the teenager told BuzzFeed News. “The last thing that I wanted was to have this become political propaganda.”
Much of the teen’s letter sounds like a partially digested version of recent news stories. There’s the partisan assumption that Comey was motivated by politics and the argument that he should have waited until after the election to mention the newly discovered emails. The only difference is that, in the girl’s telling, she is the victim of all of this not Hillary Clinton. So the reason Comey should have waited to mention the emails until after the election isn’t because it violated some FBI norms, or the Hatch act or could impact the election. It’s because reporters are calling her house!
All of this self-absorption reaches a crescendo at the conclusion of the piece when she writes, “The election is important, yes, but what happened to me and how it makes me feel and how others see me, is much more important.” That sounds like the authentic voice of a 15-year-old. I know the future of the world is important but not as important as me!
Someone on Twitter suggested that maybe this letter wasn’t written by the girl at all but by somebody writing on her behalf. Anything’s possible but I tend to think this is the real deal. After all, she wrote a letter to Anthony Weiner back when her story broke. It was the same mish-mash of half-formed ideas and self-reference.
Weiner’s victim feels it’s entirely unfair that she has become a national news story in the final week of the election. Clinton’s defenders feel the same way with regard to Hillary. But how people feel about the investigation is not the FBI’s problem. Maybe the FBI investigation of Weiner’s laptop won’t amount to anything, but getting to the facts without fear or favor is what the FBI is supposed to do.
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