The teen who allegedly received sexts from disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner wrote an open letter to FBI director James B. Comey on Wednesday, November 2, just days after her case resurfaced in connection with a continued FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
In the letter, which Buzzfeed News published in full, the teen accused Comey of reopening old wounds without warning.
“I am the 15-year-old (now 16) who was the victim of Anthony Weiner,” she began the letter. “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.”
The unnamed teen said she had just undergone a seven-hour interview with local FBI agents about the case when she and her family learned of the renewed interest in the story from a reporter calling for a statement.
“Why didn’t you communicate with the local FBI agents that I had just spoken to?” she asked. “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.”
The teen also made reference to Comey’s “vague approach” in his announcement on Friday, October 28, that the government agency was taking “investigative steps” to reexamine the Democratic presidential candidate’s email server. (Comey made mention of newly uncovered emails in a letter to several Congressmen Friday. It was later revealed that the messages in question were exchanged between Clinton, 69, and her top aide, Weiner’s estranged wife Huma Abedin, and were discovered when the FBI was looking into the sexting case.)
“Every media outlet from local to national has contacted me and my family to get my ‘story,’” she wrote. “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?”
The teen initially came forward with her story in September, sharing a number of inappropriate texts and images that Weiner, 52, had allegedly sent to her via a private chatting app. In a New York Times story on Friday following Comey’s announcement, it was reported that the “unrelated case” that the FBI was investigating when it found a number of new emails was Weiner’s.
“I thought your job as FBI Director was to protect me,” she wrote. “I thought if I cooperated with your investigation, my identity as a minor would be kept a secret. That is no longer the case. My family and I are barraged by reporters’ phone calls and emails. I have even been blamed in a newspaper for causing Donald Trump to now be leading in some polls and costing Hillary the election.”
In conclusion, the teen explained that she was choosing to make her letter public in hopes that Comey would “think about how [his] actions affect the victims of the crimes [he is] investigating.”
She signed the letter with, “Girl that lost her faith in America.”
