The women in Hunter Biden’s life are telling us something

Wilmington: Kathleen Buhle told a Delaware jury that she learnt her ex-husband was using drugs the day after their 22nd wedding anniversary in 2015.

She’d already known he struggled with alcohol, and then that night, she said, she found a crack pipe on an ashtray on their porch in Washington.

Zoe Kestan told the jury that she realised her former boyfriend used drugs the very first night they met in 2017. While working at a gentleman’s club in New York, she was sent to give a private dance to a client. The client seemed kind and “charming”. Within 10 minutes, she said, he was smoking something on the balcony.

Kathleen Buhle, Zoe Kestan and Hallie Biden testfied at Hunter Biden’s trial. Credit: AP

Hallie Biden might have known of her former partner’s demons even before the two became romantically involved. The man was her late husband’s brother, after all, and his substance issues hadn’t been a secret within the family. But as they fell in love, they fell apart. He was using drugs, she testified. She started using drugs, too.

In October 2018, Hallie found a gun in his car. Panicked, she tossed it in a rubbish bin at a grocery store, and that act is what ultimately led to the investigation that resulted in the trial that brought all three women to a courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware, to talk about this man, this addict in their lives: Hunter Biden, the son of now US President Joe Biden.

Buhle, Kestan and Hallie Biden had each been called by the prosecution to bolster the government’s legal argument: that Hunter had lied when he had purchased a revolver from a Wilmington firearms shop. That he had said he wasn’t a drug addict when, in fact, he was (his defence argues that he was not using drugs at the time of the gun purchase).

But in the course of the trial, the women of Hunter Biden’s life ended up testifying to an experience outside the boundaries of the law and beyond the boundaries of class or profession: what it feels like to cling to someone who is hellbent on his own destruction. What it means to care for someone who, as Hunter once wrote in a text message to Hallie, “ruined every relationship I’ve ever cherished”.

After Buhle found the crack pipe – she hadn’t known what it was at first, and Hunter Biden had to tell her – the life she had known began to disintegrate. She started searching his car for drugs, terrified their teenagers would stumble across them when they borrowed the car. She said she found drugs about a dozen times.

In her 2022 memoir, she describes one incident: opening a designer canvas bag to see white crystalline powder and an assortment of copper wire, tweezers, a lighter and a pocketknife. She tossed the whole bag in her bag, and then later tossed the whole thing in a public rubbish bin. It was the first, but not the last, example of a woman Biden loved trying to save him from himself by throwing out what she feared could harm him.

Hunter Biden, holding a copy of his memoir, arrives at the court with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden.Credit: AP

After Kestan and Biden began dating, she watched him vow to get better even as he was clearly getting worse. They made the decision to move to California for a fresh start, she said, but when she arrived at their rental a few days after him, it was already littered with drug paraphernalia. At one point, she said, he told her that he was going to seek out an experimental treatment. He was going to have frog venom injected into his skin to “purge” him. “When I got in the car, I thought for a second it had worked,” she testified. Twenty minutes later, she said, he smoked a crack pipe.

After Hunter and Hallie Biden got together, tied by their shared grief over Beau Biden’s death, he appeared to blame her for his inability to remain clean. “What’s the worst place for me to be trying to stay clean? Delaware,” he texted her, according to court filings, after the family had apparently arranged a gathering in the state, adding, “You are so f---ing helpful.” And another time: “What one thing have YOU done to help me get sober?” And another time: “Do you want me dead?”

He texted an unidentified number about an unidentified woman who might have been Hallie, or might have been Kestan, or might have been Buhele, or might have been none of them: “I blame her for being a selfish self-righteous hypocritical c--- that actually truly works against my getting sober.”

Most of these stories are not new disclosures. Hunter Biden has told his own story of addiction on many occasions. His 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, is a recounting of pain and turmoil so thorough that passages of the book have been used by the prosecution in this trial as incriminating evidence.

But to hear the story of this unravelling from the perspective of the women closest to him drives home how much an addiction poisons everything and everyone it touches. He was sick. They were sick. Life became defined by sickness.

First lady Jill Biden departs from the court in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday.Credit: AP

One of the poignant things to come out of Biden’s legal saga is the acknowledgment that it is not unique. During jury selection, potential jurors shared that they, too, knew what it was like to be defined by a loved one’s sickness. “My daughter’s been given a second chance,” one juror told lawyers. “Everyone deserves a second chance.” Another said that she had lost multiple friends to drug addiction and that such losses were “an everyday part of the world nowadays”.

Through much of the trial, first lady Jill Biden sat in the gallery. She showed up day after day in tailored suits to witness the evidence of her son’s destruction, which also must have destroyed her, which had also destroyed him. She sat near Hunter’s sister, Ashley, and his current wife, Melissa (Melissa and Hunter have said he has remained clean since their marriage in 2019).

But through the course the trial, what it felt like was this: Buhele, Kestan and Hallie Biden had been called as witnesses for the prosecution. But all the women there became witnesses for all the drug epidemics and all the relationships those epidemics have tested or thwarted. All the people that addiction punished and pulled apart, even without the involvement of the courts. A non-profit executive, an exotic dancer, a school counsellor, a filmmaker, the first lady of the United States, all of them in the courtroom, all of them communicating: It is hell, it is hell, it is hell.

The Washington Post