Twenty days after the scandal dubbed "Weinergate" erupted with the sending of a sexually suggestive photograph on Twitter, a rising star of the Democrats was forced to resign his congressional seat in the face of pressure from the highest levels of his party.
In a brief statement delivered at the same elder person's centre in Brooklyn where he launched his first electoral campaign 20 years ago,Anthony Weiner repeated his apologies to his wife and constituents for the "personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused". He said that the "distraction I have created" made it impossible to continue.
As he announced his resignation, a heckler at the back of the hall shouted: "Bye bye pervert!"
From having been ranked as a possible future Democratic leader and the frontrunner to become New York mayor in 2013, Weiner's fall from grace is spectacular and close to complete. He has spent his entire adult life in politics, having been elected in 1991 as the youngest councillor to serve in New York city at the age of 27.
True to his character as an abrasive and at times antagonistic politician, Weiner, now 46, at first tried to lie his way out of the sex scandal he provoked by sending lewd photographs of himself to several different women.
When the rightwing blogger Andrew Breitbart revealed his actions on 28 May, Weiner initially claimed his Twitter account had been hacked into. He later changed his story to say he wasn't sure whether the images of a semi-naked man were of him.
After further revelations emerged virtually every day of his sexually charged interactions, he went in front of the cameras on 6 June to admit that he had been involved with at least six different women in cyberspace. But even then he refused to stand down from his New York seat.
The fallout from the scandal rose to the top of the Democratic party. On Monday, President Obama said that "if it was me, I would resign".
Bill Clinton has also taken a direct role in pushing Weiner. The former president has reportedly been "livid" about Weiner's behaviour, despite Clinton's own history of sexual peccadilloes.
The Clintons are intricately linked with Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin. Bill Clinton officiated at their wedding. Also, Abedin is a close aide to the secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and her best friend Doug Band is Bill Clinton's top adviser.
"The decision for Weiner to go was taken on a presidential level, by the existing and a past president," said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant who has worked on campaigns for Bill Clinton. "It was a straight political decision."
The views of Abedin, who is pregnant with their first child, were also likely to have been crucial. She returned on Wednesday from a trip to the Middle East with Clinton and was in discussions with her husband before his announcement.
The official line taken by party leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic chief in the House of Representatives who called on him to resign, was that the scandal was distracting attention from important political debates such as the economy.
The imbroglio has fallen at a sensitive time in which the party's coffers for next year's presidential race are being filled. Key fundraisers have complained that donors were being turned off by the salacious revelations.
Weiner might have found it easier to weather the storm if he had more friends within the party. But his outspoken and irascible style earned him few protectors within Congress or the White House.
Despite the almost universal pressure on him to go, there remain those in the party who lamented Weiner's passing as a prominent liberal politician who was prepared to speak out on core left-wing principles. "He was a firebrand, an independent voice. Yes, he was a little quirky and he had an ego, but at least on the issues that liberals care about he was upfront," said Democratic strategist Victor Kamber.
Weiner now faces a bleak future. With no training in law and without the media behind him, there is nowhere obvious for him to go, unlike Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former New York governor who is now a CNN presenter.
Sheinkopf predicted it would be at least 10 years, "if ever", before Weiner could contemplate a comeback in politics.
Weiner himself said that he would now be looking for ways outside politics "to contribute my talents", adding that "with God's help and hard work, we will all be successful".
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