Hunter Biden’s ex-wife describes affairs, ‘abuse’

Kathleen Buhle to release memoir detailing Hunter’s drug abuse and affair with brother’s widow.

Hunter Biden’s wife is set to publish a memoir about their marriage. Picture: AFP.

Hunter Biden’s former wife plans to release an explosive memoir before the midterm elections in November, detailing how his drug abuse and affair with his dead brother’s widow fuelled the breakdown of their 24-year marriage.

If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction and Healing by Kathleen Buhle is described by its publisher as a “heartbreaking” account of the collapse of her marriage to the president’s second son and threatens to cause new embarrassment for the first family.

The book promises to reveal the toll taken on their relationship by Biden’s well-publicised struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. Buhle, 53, claims that her husband threw their money away on cocaine, alcohol and prostitutes before beginning an affair with his sister-in-law. “When my marriage ended, I felt like I’d lost my sense of who I was,” Buhle told People magazine, which first reported on the memoir to be released in June. “Anyone who has seen addiction ruin a relationship, or been through infidelity and divorce, can tell you how devastating it feels.”

The couple were divorced in April 2017, weeks after the news broke that Biden, 51, had been having an affair with Hallie Biden, the widow of his older brother Beau, who had died of brain cancer less than two years earlier. Joe Biden learnt of the affair when a journalist from the New York Post called to ask for a comment. Buhle said that she had forgiven Biden’s past affairs and tried for years to help him beat his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol, but that the relationship with Hallie was the final straw. “I’m leaving you because you are having an affair and you have been emotionally abusive,” Buhle wrote in an email from July 2016, as reported by the Daily Mail. “I forgave you for cheating before, I tried to help you get sober and you made it clear … you didn’t want my forgiveness and you didn’t want my help with your recovery.”

Biden released a memoir, Beautiful Things, last year in which he admitted his wife had discovered the affair with Hallie after finding texts between them.

“That gave her the gift of justification: I was the sicko sleeping with my brother’s wife … our relationship had begun as a mutually desperate grasping for love we both had lost. Its dissolution only deepened that tragedy,” he wrote.

Biden and Buhle have three daughters. Biden married Melissa Cohen in 2019 and the couple had a son the next year, whom they named Beau.

Buhle told People that she had “realised through those crushing experiences that I needed to find a way to stand on my own”. She said she hoped “it will be meaningful to those who have been through addiction or divorce, and especially to women who have felt like their entire identity was tied to their spouse”.

The Times