Disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner has been ordered to register as a sex offender as he nears the end of a 21-month prison sentence for having illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl, according to a Fox News report.
Edited by: JV Staff
A New York City judge on Friday designated Weiner a Level 1 sex offender, meaning he’s thought to have a low risk of reoffending.
Weiner must register for a minimum of 20 years. He’s required to verify his address every year and visit a police station every three years to have a new picture taken.
Weiner didn’t attend Friday’s court hearing. He’s in a halfway house after serving most of his sentence at a prison in Massachusetts. He’s due to be released May 14.
At his sentencing, Weiner said he’d been a “very sick man for a very long time” and said he had a sex addiction.
Weiner’s lawyer said the former lawmaker likely exchanged thousands of messages with hundreds of women over the years and was communicating with up to 19 women when he encountered the teenager.
It wasn’t the first time Weiner had been caught acting inappropriately.
After sending a lewd picture of himself to a college student in 2011, Weiner claimed his account had been hacked, then admitted online interactions with at least six other women while married to top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Fox News reported that Weiner was released from prison in February and entered the federal re-entry program in New York as he awaits his full release.
He was transferred from Federal Medical Center in Massachusetts into the care of New York’s Residential Re-entry Management program.
Because of his low-level designation, Weiner’s information won’t show up in the state’s online sex offender registry but will be available via a toll-free telephone number.
Weiner pleaded guilty in May 2017 to transferring obscene material to a minor.
Prosecutors said he had a series of sexually explicit Skype and Snapchat exchanges with a North Carolina high school student and encouraged the teen to strip naked and touch herself sexually.
Good conduct while in prison has shaved off about three months from his sentence. He will spend three years on supervised release and will have to pay a $10,000 fine.
Once a prominent star in the Democratic Party, Weiner’s political career began to unravel in 2011 when he resigned from Congress after admitting to sending an X-rated photo and engaging in inappropriate relationships with women online. While he attempted a comeback in 2013 when he ran for New York City mayor, that campaign went off the tracks when it was revealed that he had sexted with another woman under the pseudonym “Carlos Danger.”
