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Local New Jersey Politician Resigns Amid Sexting Scandal

Louis N. Magazzu.
Cumberland County
Louis N. Magazzu.

Yet another politician has given up his seat because explicit pictures of themselves ended up on the World Wide Web and in this case on the site of a political adversary.

Louis N. Magazzu, 53-year-old Democrat, had been a New Jersey freeholder, or county commissioner, for nearly 14 years. He resigned, yesterday, amid a controversy that's becoming very familiar: Magazzu texted naked pictures of himself to a woman he'd never met in person and then those pictures went public.

The twist, here, reports The Daily Journal is that in his resignation letter, Magazzu alleges that Carl B. Johnson, a politicial adversary that runs a site called magazzuwatch.com, was behind it all. Here's part of Magazzu's statement via The Journal:

"Unfortunately, in my personal life, I did not always demonstrate the wisdom and balance that I expected from myself, and that the people of Cumberland County deserve and have every right to expect," Magazzu wrote Tuesday.

"As a consequence, a woman who I have never met personally, but have corresponded with on the internet for several years, has recently shared some photographs which she requested and that were intended only for her eyes," he said in his resignation letter. "I did not know that she was working with an avowed political enemy to distribute these pictures. I have retained counsel to determine what laws may have been broken by the unauthorized distribution of those pictures. No government services or equipment were used by me when taking the pictures or transmitting them to the woman in question."

On his website, Johnson denies those allegations.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eyder Peralta is NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.