How Huma Abedin Discovered Her Husband's Betrayal Was Even Worse Than We Knew — and Learned to Forgive

For Huma Abedin, the betrayals broadcast by headlines around the world were excruciating enough.

There was husband Anthony Weiner's first sexting scandal — the one in 2011 that blew up just one year into their marriage, when she was pregnant, and precipitated his resignation from Congress. Then there was his second major scandal, in 2013 (under the nom de plume Carlos Danger) and then a third in 2016 — the one involving a lewd photo with the couple's sleeping 4-year-old son in the frame; and the one when Abedin sent Weiner packing.

Finally, in 2017 Weiner went to federal prison on a 21-month sentence for sexting with an underage girl over Skype.

But now, in her new memoir and an interview with PEOPLE, Abedin reveals that there was even more to Weiner's sexual compulsions — as she learned later, his self-destructive behavior had a diagnosis — than what made headlines.

In June 2019, one month after Weiner was released from prison and on the same day that the New York Post obtained a photo of him with a woman he'd begun dating, Abedin, 45, went "pain shopping" through an old phone of his.

"I found what I was looking for and I read it all," she writes in Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds. "It took me eight hours."

Through emails and texts and photos and "love letters from Anthony to women not named Huma," Abedin writes, she discovered that Weiner's infidelity had been more than a "digital fantasy."

"Women had been with my husband, in my house, surrounded by pictures of my family. Maybe they touched my clothes, tried on my jewelry, ate and drank from my fridge," Abedin writes in the final pages of a sweeping 502-page memoir that includes her upbringing in Saudi Arabia as the American daughter of an Indian father and Pakistani mother, a 25-year career (starting as a White House intern fresh out of college) as right-hand-woman to Hillary Clinton, and the calamitous marriage to a Brooklyn-born Jewish congressman from Queens, New York.

Abedin, in an easygoing hour-long chat with PEOPLE, says matter-of-factly that Weiner's extramarital physical relations — as she pieced the data from his phone together — began some time after his second sexting relapse in 2013.

At that time, she was working at the State Department and traveling the world with Secretary Clinton while Weiner was stay-at-home dad to their toddler son, Jordan.

She describes her painful, clandestine discovery as something of an epiphany, a last straw that allowed her, finally, to let go of years' worth of anger and bitterness. "I was always bracing for the next bad news call, the next piece of, 'Aha! We discovered this,' " Abedin says, adding that it was her lifestyle for so long that she almost titled her book Bracing.

"One of the things I learned is that, as time went on, his behavior got more and more dangerous. And look where it led. The whole world knows where it led — a disastrous end result and difficult consequences," she says. "Now, I'm not bracing for the next news call. It was all in there."

Abedin's next step was a therapist-guided process with Weiner called disclosure, in which he wrote down "his entire romantic history" and she laid out for him how "finally knowing the full truth" felt and then he mapped out a practical, actionable plan for making things right with her and their son.

"In disclosure, you share deeply painful truths with each other. You do the work on yourself — and each other — on how to rebuild trust," Abedin says.

So much pain, she remembers. But it had a purpose: "It was a very difficult process, and it was really about our son."

"Anthony is always going to be in my life because he is the father of my child," she says. "I want to make sure he's healthy, that we are in a healthy relationship, that our son sees model behavior that is healthy for him."

An Addiction, Not a Choice

Reliving her marital trauma in order to write Both/And, whose chapters on Weiner's scandals hold very little back, was "great therapy," Abedin says now. (She decided to plunge forward with the book after a male friend told her, "No one is going to want to read more about this scandal and you're not going to be able to satisfactorily answer people's questions." Proving him wrong proved incentive.)

The memoir, her chance to "write my own history," as she says, is also a manifestation of her determination to close the book on the scandal and move on. "It was better to relive — to feel — than to do what I had done over the course of years, which was to collect anger, to be bitter, to resent my partner for the circumstances he caused. It was slowly eating at me," Abedin says. "I can't live any more in that state of anger, resentment or what I lost, or what could've, would've, should've."

Has she forgiven him? She pauses. "I think you have to forgive to move on," she says. "And it took me a while to understand that."

It helped that she could feel "empathy" for Weiner once his compulsive behavior was diagnosed as an addiction, she says.

For a long time, she couldn't understand his reckless and sexual online behavior. "I didn't have a lot of experience," admits Abedin, who was raised to save sex for marriage. ("That was a choice I made," she says.)

She thought her husband was making a choice, too, when he repeatedly betrayed her. "I thought, back in 2011, that whatever Anthony was dealing with, he could just knock it off," she says. "Part of it is I was raised with so much discipline and moderation and control. I mean, I was so good at control that it was hard to understand why he couldn't just get everything under control. I absolutely thought it was a choice."

"I did not see it as a mental illness. But once somebody self-sabotages over and over again, I just don't believe that's something somebody does intentionally. ... I learned from my parents this concept of 'radical empathy,' and I'm able to show him empathy now."

"I realize, my God, it's a privilege to be alive and healthy and have a family, a son, an extended family that loves me, and I'm just grateful to have that," she says. "I'm not living in that old world of anger and 'Why?' I've made peace with myself, I've made peace with my ex, and we're figuring out how to live in this world."

The Next Chapter

In what she describes as "the final stages of our divorce," Abedin and Weiner today live in separate apartments in the same New York City building. Almost every weekday morning, he comes to her and Jordan's apartment and, together, they walk their now-9-year-old son to school.

"He's surrounded by both parents. We take him to hockey. We do things together as a family so that my son understands — his parents don't live together, but he does see us as two equal grownups in his life," says Abedin. "He is our focus, to make sure that he's happy and whole."

Abedin remains in what she calls "Hillaryland," as chief of staff to the former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. While Abedin says she can envision not working for Clinton, "I don't see a world where I'm completely disconnected from Hillaryland. I think she'll be a presence in my life for a long time."

She cannot quite yet envision her own next act.

"I'm stealing Shonda Rhimes's approach to the world when she [talked about] 'my year of saying yes.' I'm in kind of the same place, which is I'm open to all kinds of new ideas and suggestions," Abedin says.

Does that include Dancing with the Stars?

"Oh, god. I'm a terrible dancer. Not Dancing with the Stars," she says emphatically. "I would explore almost anything — just not dancing or politics." (On Monday, in the first live TV interview of her otherwise behind-the-scenes career, Abedin was asked about running for political office and replied, "I'm not saying no to anything." The following day, she tells PEOPLE, "I was super nervous, shaking. I didn't really hear the question. ... I'm not running for office. Put a nail in that coffin for me.")

And does Abedin's own "year of saying yes" extend to dating?

"Oh, I'm an optimist about love and marriage," she says. "It's not something I see in my future right now. I only have one man in my life, and he's 9. But I have no hard feelings of 'I would never do this' or 'I would never do that.' "