Jenny Sanford Offers Huma Abedin Sympathy: 'My Heart Goes Out To Her'

Jenny Sanford, the former wife of Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), offered words of sympathy to Huma Abedin, whose husband Anthony Weiner admitted Tuesday to sending sexually explicit messages to a woman over the internet two years after a similar scandal led him to resign from Congress.

"As a person and as a woman and as a wife, I’ve been through the painful reality of marriage with a troubled individual and having it in the press," Sanford told the Washington Post. "My heart goes out to her."

Sanford and her ex-husband, then the governor of South Carolina, divorced in 2010 after he admitted to having an affair with María Belén Chapur, an Argentine woman to whom he is now engaged. Sanford, unlike Weiner, stayed in office, and was elected to Congress in a special election earlier this year.

Abedin and Weiner, a former Democratic congressman and current New York City mayoral candidate, appeared at a press conference on Tuesday to address the new allegations.

"Anthony has made some horrible mistakes, both before he resigned from Congress and after," Abedin said. "But I do strongly believe that that is between us and our marriage. We discussed all of this before Anthony decided to run for mayor."

She continued, "I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him, and as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward."

(h/t Talking Points Memo)