Former porn star Ginger Lee appeared at a press conference in New York Tuesday to discuss her relationship with embattled Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.).
"I did not sext Anthony Weiner," Lee said in a statement. "I did not send photos to him or receive photos from him. Any time he would take conversations in a sexual direction, I would not reciprocate."
“When the scandal broke and people started emailing me, I did not know what to do. So I emailed Anthony Weiner. He asked me to lie about our communication."
"I think that Anthony Weiner should resign, because he lied to the public and the press for more than a week," Lee concluded.
Lee is one of the six women with whom Weiner has admitted exchanging explicit messages online.
According to Lee's lawyer, Gloria Allred, Lee and Weiner exchanged approximately 100 emails, starting in March and ending approximately two weeks ago. In a number of them, Weiner made reference to his "package."
“I have wardrobe demands too. I need to highlight my package," Allred read from one email allegedly sent by Weiner. “Alright, my package and I are not going to beg," he apparently wrote in another.
When Lee's name first appeared in connection to Weiner -- Lee tweeted on March 13 that Weiner had sent her a direct message on Twitter -- both she and the congressman dismissed any notion that they had a relationship.
“This is another person who I -- has gotten dragged into this for no reason other than she was following me and asked to be followed by me,” Weiner told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on June 1, as he sought to keep the lid on the scandal. “I think what this is about is a fairly pro forma thing that goes out that I send out to people as I follow them.”
“This has gotten a little bit crazy. I don't know who the woman is. I followed her for a moment. And then someone started Tweeting, oh my goodness, Anthony Weiner is following someone in that industry.”
“I haven’t met Rep Weiner. I follow him on Twitter because I support him & what he stands for,” Lee said in an email to The Daily Caller. “I have been hounded by his political opponents but that hasn’t changed my view of him and what he fights for.”
According to TMZ.com, however, at the same time that Weiner was denying any direct contact with Lee, he was corresponding with her to offer advice on how to manage the scandal.
"Do you need to talk to a professional PR type person to give u advice?” he asked on June 2. “I can have someone on my team call.”
"The key is to have a short, thought out statement that tackles the top line questions and then refer people back to it," he said. "Have a couple of iterations of: 'This is silly. Like so many others, I follow Rep. Weiner on Twitter. I don't know him and have never met him. He briefly followed me and sent me a dm saying thank you for the follow. That's it.'"
Lee said on Wednesday that as the scandal grew, she emailed Weiner for advice, but wasn't comfortable with the statement he asked her to give to the media denying that they were in contact.
Allred said that should her client be asked to cooperate with a House ethics investigation, Lee would cooperate full. “She stands ready to cooperate with that investigation if asked to do so," Allred said. "If asked to testify, she will testify truthfully. And she will provide all of her communications to and from the congressman to the committee.”
