'Did I feel like he was assaulting me? It didn't feel that way': Huma Abedin ...

Huma Abedin has spoken publicly for the first time, breaking her silence to discuss being kissed by a senator against her will, and the collapse of her marriage to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner.

Abedin, who for 25 years has served as Hillary Clinton's most loyal aide, spoke to CBS's Norah O'Donnell for an interview that will air on Sunday.

She recounted an incident from the 2000s, described in her new memoir, in which a senator invited her back to his apartment in Washington DC and surprised her by kissing her.

'I did go back to a senator's apartment - a senator who I knew and was very comfortable with - and he kissed me, in a very shocking way,' she told O'Donnell.

'Because it was somebody I had known, and, frankly, trusted.' 

Abedin wrote in her memoir that she attended the dinner without Clinton, then-senator from New York, but with 'a few senators and their aides,' according to a copy of the book obtained by The Guardian.  

'I ended up walking out with one of the senators, and soon we stopped in front of his building and he invited me in for coffee. Once inside, he told me to make myself comfortable on the couch.'

She said the senator took off his blazer, rolled up his sleeves and made coffee before sitting beside her on the couch. 

'Then, in an instant, it all changed. He plopped down to my right, put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa.

'I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased.'

She said that the senator seemed shocked but apologized and said he had 'misread' their relationship. 

Abedin said she then plotted how to leave 'without this ending badly,' as the senator asked her if she wanted to stay. 

'Then I said something only the twentysomething version of me would have come up with – 'I am so sorry' – and walked out, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible.' 

Abedin, now 45, said that she kept her distance from the senator 'for a few days,' but eventually ran into him on Capitol Hill. 

He asked her at the time if they were still friends, and she nodded. She wrote that Clinton then came up to join them. 

The Clinton aide said that the memory of the couch incident was suppressed until she read about Ford 'being accused of 'conveniently' remembering' her alleged assault. 

Ford claimed Kavanaugh assaulted her at a gathering in high school, Kavanaugh claimed such an incident never happened and was still confirmed to the bench.

O'Donnell asked whether Abedin felt that the senator assaulted her.

'I'm suggesting that I was in an uncomfortable situation, with a senator, and I didn't know how to deal with it,' she replied.

'And I buried the whole experience. But in my own personal opinion, no.

'Did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment? It didn't feel that way. 

'It felt like I needed to extricate myself from that situation. And he also spent a lot of time apologizing and making sure I was OK.

'And we were actually able to rebalance our relationship.' 

Abedin was asked by O'Donnell why she was speaking out now.

'I think for most of my adult life, certainly in the last 25 years that I've been in public service or in the public eye, I have been the invisible person behind the primary people in my life,' she said. 

'But what I realize is that if you don't tell your story, somebody else is writing your history.'

Abedin's life has been overshadowed both by the Clintons, to whom she remains a loyal and ever-present aide, and by her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.  

Weiner and Abedin married back in 2010, in a star-studded ceremony at a Long Island mansion, officiated by President Bill Clinton, and during which Hillary Clinton called the bride the closest thing she had to a second daughter.