LONGTIME Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has revealed that she was sexually assaulted by a US senator in her new book, The Guardian reported.
Abedin has made the claim in a memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, which will be published next week.
However, she does not name the senator or his party or give any other clues as to his identity, the report added.
According to her, the alleged assault happened when Clinton was a US senator from New York, between 2001 and 2009.
Abedin, who was born in Michigan but grew up in Saudi Arabia.
The passage comes shortly after a description of how Abedin and the Clintons came to attend Donald Trump’s wedding to his third wife, Melania Knauss, in Palm Beach, Florida, in January 2005, The Guardian report, referring to the book, added.
“I ended up walking out with one of the senators, and soon we stopped in front of his building and he invited me in for coffee. Once inside, he told me to make myself comfortable on the couch," the newspaper report said quoting from the book.
Abedin said the senator took off his blazer, rolled up his sleeves and made coffee while they continued to talk.
“Then, in an instant, it all changed. He plopped down to my right, put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa. I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased," she wrote in the book.
According to her, the senator seemed surprised but apologized and said he had “misread” her “all this time”. Later, she walked out, trying to appear "as nonchalant as possible".
After the incident, she kept away from the senator “for a few days” but then ran into him on Capitol Hill, nodding when he asked if they were still friends.
Clinton then joined them, “as if she knew I needed rescuing even though I’d told her nothing about that night”, she wrote in the book.
She stayed friendly with the senator and soon “buried the incident”, which she wanted to forget, succeeding in erasing it from her mind “entirely”.
Then, in late 2018, Kavanaugh was nominated to the supreme court by Donald Trump. A professor, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a party years earlier, an allegation Kavanaugh denied.
Abedin’s memory of the incident was triggered when she read about Ford “being accused of ‘conveniently’ remembering” her alleged assault.
Earlier this month, an excerpt from the book published by Vogue dealt with Abedin’s experiences when her husband, the former congressman and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, became embroiled in repeated scandal over sexually explicit behaviour on social media.
Abedin and Weiner are now estranged, the report added.
