Disgraced New York City politician Anthony Weiner began his 21-month prison sentence for sexting a 15-year-old girl on Monday.
A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that the former Congressman and mayoral candidate, who was sentenced on Sept. 25, arrived at the Federal Medical Center, Devens, in Ayer, Massachusetts. He had until 2 p.m. to surrender himself.
The men’s facility, which is about 40 miles west of Boston, is, according to its website, “an administrative security federal medical center with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp.”
There are a total of 1,138 total inmates, including Peter Madoff, Bernie Madoff’s brother, who is serving a 10-year sentence, and Danny Heinrich, who was sentenced to 20 years on child pornography charges last year. The charge came three months after Heinrich confessed to abducting, molesting and murdering 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in Minnesota in 1989, whose disappearance had been a decades-old cold case.
At his sentencing, where prosecutors sought a two-year sentence, Weiner’s lawyers requested probation instead of incarceration so the former politician could continue therapy and his Sex Addicts Anonymous sessions, The New York Times reported.
“It’s a serious crime that deserves serious punishment,” Judge Denise Cote said.
Weiner, who was tearful at the sentencing, said he was “a very sick man for a very long time.”
Devens is one of nine federal prisons — and the closest to New York — that offers the treatment Weiner is slated to continue, the New York Daily News reported.
On May 19, Weiner pleaded guilty to one count of sending obscene material to a minor, a 15-year-old girl from North Carolina in 2016.
That same day, his wife, longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, filed for divorce. The couple has a 5-year-old son.
The sexting incident was the last in Weiner’s years-long downfall that began in May 2011, when he tweeted a graphic picture of himself in his underwear, and included possibly playing a pivotal role in Clinton’s loss to Republican Donald Trump last year when emails between Clinton and Abedin were found on his computer by federal investigators.
