WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., said a lewd photo of a man in his underpants sent from his Twitter account may have been "taken out of context."
It's possible the photo, sent to a female college student in Washington state, started out as a private photo and somehow got used in a way he didn't intend, Weiner said in MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" Wednesday night.
"Or it could have been a photograph that was taken out of context or manipulated or changed in some way so maybe it did, it did -- or maybe it's a photograph that was dropped into an account from somewhere else," he told the program. "I can't say. I don't want to cast this net wider by saying it's someone else, so I'm going to say that I can't say with certitude that it's me or it's not."
Weiner, a six-term member of Congress who has been under pressure since last weekend to answer questions about the controversy, reiterated he had not sent the photo from his Twitter account.
Earlier, in a CNN interview, Wolf Blitzer asked Weiner if he had ever taken a photo like that of himself.
"There are – I have photographs," Weiner replied. "I don't know what photographs are out there in the world of me. I don't know what things have been manipulated and doctored."
The questions arose after Weiner's Twitter-related photo-sharing account sent a sexually suggestive photo of a man from the waist down, wearing only boxer briefs, to Gennette Cordova, a 21-year-old student at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Wash.
Cordova is listed as a fan of the congressman but says she never met him. She once jokingly called him "my boyfriend," the New York Daily News reported.
Weiner's office said his Twitter account had been hacked, and the congressman quickly took the photo down.
Weiner, 46,is married to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, 35.
Former President Bill Clinton presided at the Weiners' wedding July 10, 2010, at a 109,000-square-foot mansion known as Oheka Castle on the Gold Coast of New York's Long Island. The mansion -- the second-largest private home in the United States -- was the country home of late-19th century, early-20th century financier and philanthropist Otto Kahn.
