Married since May 2019, Hunter Biden seemed to lead a (finally) tidy life.
This was without counting on the publication of an article in the
Washington Examiner
, a conservative American newspaper, on Monday, June 27.
We learn that the 50-year-old spent more than 30,000 dollars (28,000 euros) to hire the services of Russian prostitutes, between November 2018 and March 2019. Many of them would be employed by an unlisted "modeling agency", called UberGFE.
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Appointments that he would have settled with the money of his father, then campaigning for the presidency of the United States (there is no evidence, however, that the latter was aware of these actions).
This information had been found on the hard drive of a damaged computer, sent to a repairer who had transmitted the contents to the FBI and to Rudy Giuliani, a close friend of Donald Trump.
In his autobiography
Les Belles Choses
, published in September 2021, Hunter Biden spoke with sincerity of the multiple escapades that have marked his life.
A first tragedy
On the cover of the book, a blond boy in shorts holds the hand of an adult in a suit.
This little boy with a pensive gaze, born on February 4, 1970 in Wilmington, is none other than the youngest son of Joe Biden.
The child is miles away from suspecting that the man at his side will one day become the 46th President of the United States.
He is currently pacing the garden of the family home in Delaware, where his parents Joe and Neilia live, his brother Beau, born in 1969, and his sister Naomi Christina, born in 1971.
However, a tragedy is about to turn their lives upside down.
In December 1972, Neilia and her three children travel to downtown Wilmington to buy a Christmas tree.
On the way, their vehicle hit a truck.
Neilia and Naomi Christina do not survive the accident.
Hunter and Beau Biden, then 2 and 3 years old, are meanwhile admitted to a local hospital.
One suffers from a serious head injury;
the other from a broken leg.
"I love you I love you I love you"
The scene following Hunter Biden's awakening will remain etched in his memory.
Opening his eyes, he finds his older brother lying on an adjacent bed.
“I love you, I love you, I love you,” he keeps whispering to her.
Their father Joe Biden refuses to leave their bedside: just elected senator, it is in their hospital room that he takes the oath, on January 5, 1973.
The drama completes the consolidation of the unbreakable bonds of the trio.
Father and son now have blind trust in each other to the point that, when Joe Biden undertakes work in the family home, the latter does not hesitate to hold Hunter by the ankles, through a second floor window, so that he repaints the eaves.
During the following years, uncles, aunts and grandparents took turns to take care of the two boys.
“
We have never mourned the death of our mother and our little sister (…), confides the author of Les
Belles Choses
.
It is thanks to our father who knew how to heroically mobilize the whole family, so that we are constantly surrounded by love
.”
An “idyllic childhood”
Despite the drama, Hunter and Beau Biden are enjoying an "idyllic childhood."
Together, they build cabins, travel the local roads on mountain bikes, play hockey on the frozen pond... And sometimes skip school to accompany their father to Washington.
They thus roam in the sports hall of the Congress, or slip into the sauna, on the lookout for informal exchanges between parliamentarians.
Yet Hunter Biden already feels like he is apart.
“I always felt alone in the middle of the crowd,” he writes.
Fortunately, in 1977, Joe Biden married a young teacher named Jill Jacobs.
Gradually, the feeling of loneliness fades.
"When our father remarried after the 'accident', as we called him, he gave us the mother who is ours today as a bonus," enthuses Hunter Biden.
In 1981, a little girl named Ashley joined the family.
In video, Jill Biden arrives at the G7 in a jacket embroidered with the word "Love"
“Hunter thinks with his heart”
As a teenager, the young man punctuated his studies with odd jobs, from waiter to valet to dishwasher.
He was 14 years old when he knowingly drank his first glass of alcohol.
A real “revelation”, he writes.
"Alcohol seemed to take away all the questions I had about my discomfort."
However, it is only growing.
The year of his senior year, Joe Biden nearly succumbed to a ruptured aneurysm.
A real blow for Hunter, who sees in him one of the benchmarks of his existence.
Deprived of the advice of his older brother, a student at a distant university, he once again feels lonely.
And skids: in June 1988, the high school student was arrested in possession of cocaine and received a six-month probationary sentence.
This is the first of a long series of discrepancies.
Hunter proves to be as impulsive as Beau is reasonable.
"
Beau thought first with his head
,
" said one of their high school friends, Brian McGlinchey, in the columns of the
New Yorker
.
Instead, Hunter thought with his heart
.
A marriage and three children
Fortunately, his heart also led him to more serene places: after graduating with a degree in history from Georgetown University in 1992, the young man decided, on the advice of a priest, to spend a year in of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Portland organization whose volunteers support poverty-stricken communities.
Hunter Biden meets there Kathleen Buhle, a "pretty blonde from Chicago", with whom he begins a romance three months later.
When they sealed their union in July 1993, Kathleen was pregnant with their first child, Naomi, who was born in December of the same year.
Three years later, Hunter Biden graduated from Yale Law School.
In 1998, Kathleen gave birth to their second daughter, Finnegan, then to a third child, Maisy, in 2000. At the dawn of the second millennium, the son of Joe Biden, an accomplished family man, seems to have regained control of his life.
"Functional Alcoholic"
Having become a lawyer for the bank holding company MBNA - a controversial choice, because the company constitutes one of the biggest donors of the successive campaigns of his father -, Hunter Biden also accepts a post of director of the Commerce Department under the administration Bill Clinton.
And works, in parallel, for a federal lobbying firm, as well as as an associate of the law firm Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, located in Washington.
A life as a busy businessman, powerful but under pressure: it was during this period that he became what he called a “functional alcoholic”.
"I was always able to drink five times as much as the others - but I now spent the night in Washington and did not return in time to take the children to school in the morning," he explains in his book.
When the family moved to the capital in 2003, Hunter Biden tried to wean himself.
In vain.
“I didn't touch a drop of alcohol for three months, then I got drunk for three days non-stop,” he recalls.
He performs the first of a long series of detoxification treatments, and attends, on the advice of his brother Beau, a meeting - saving - of Alcoholics Anonymous.
"You're kidding ?"
But in November 2010, it's the relapse.
A few months earlier, his brother Beau had been admitted to hospital due, according to his spokespersons, to a “mild attack”.
Three years later, doctors diagnose the eldest Biden with a brain tumor: Hunter Biden, who now lives in his own apartment in Washington, starts drinking between “twelve and sixteen hours in a row”.
In the meantime, he is also fired from his job as a Navy reservist after testing positive for cocaine.
His new functions, in April 2014, within the board of directors of Burisma, an overpowering Ukrainian energy company, will cause his deepest plunge into addiction.
"If at the beginning, my comfortable remuneration allowed me to have more and more time and means to take care of my brother, it served the worst aspects of my addictive impulses after his death", laments t- he.
Beau Biden died on June 6, 2015 at the age of 46 in a hospital room, surrounded by his father, his brother and their family.
Joe and Hunter Biden mourn their lost dream;
that of seeing Beau, Attorney General of Delaware from 2007 to 2015, one day become President of the United States.
This tragedy will also get the better of the couple formed by Hunter and Kathleen, already damaged by the multiple relapses of the lawyer.
“Without my brother, these difficulties were further amplified
,
” he recalls
.
At the slightest problem, he was always there to guide me.
I felt lost.”
The day after the funeral, Hunter Biden announces to his wife that he wants to go into politics.
“Are you kidding?” she replies.
Their divorce will be pronounced two years later.
Hunter's Odyssey
In 2016, he began a new drug treatment.
But slams the door in a fit of anger, and sets off on a bicycle through the streets of Washington.
He is looking for one person: Rhea, alias "Bicycles", "a black homeless person perched on a mountain bike three times too big for her", whom he met in the early 1990s, and whom he asks to provide him with crack.
Rhea will end up supplying it daily and settling in the businessman's apartment for five months.
“Most of the time, we were just planting ourselves on the couch and smoking tons of crack,” reveals Hunter Biden.
The infernal spiral lasts three years.
Punctuated, in October 2016, by an “odyssey across the country” under the influence of illicit substances.
Which will end with a car accident on the outskirts of Palm Springs, California.
A romance with Hallie Biden
His salvation comes from his brother's widow, who gradually became his confidante - then his companion.
Hunter naturally calls on Hallie Biden to pick him up after his accident.
They have exchanged many text messages since August 2016.
“
We shared a very particular grief, he underlines in the columns of the
New Yorker
.
I started to think of Hallie as the only person who understood my grief.
»
A romance is born from this immense shared pain.
"It goes without saying that the invisible force that was at work here was none other than Beau
,
" said Hunter Biden
.
Today it seems obvious, but at the time we were driven by a dynamic never expressed, or even recognized: the idea that by being together, we could keep Beau alive.
In March 2017,
Page Six
reveals their love story.
"Beau Biden's widow has an affair with her married brother-in-law", headlines the American newspaper.
Faced with the shock wave, Joe Biden agrees to publish a press release.
"We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they put their lives in order after so much sadness
,
" the senator's official message read.
They have my full support, as does Jill's, and we are happy for them."
But already, the couple is floundering.
“If there is a union that was doomed to failure, it was ours
,
admits Hunter Biden today
.
She made perfect sense, except that she didn't have any."
A new hope
In the spring of 2018, Hunter Biden sinks again, and embarks on a new odyssey.
He stays for six weeks in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where he learns to cook his own crack and sees a succession of junkies, strippers, crooks and thieves at home.
It is his uncle Jim who will come to dislodge him from his suite.
A few months later, the businessman tries to reconcile with Hallie Biden and to follow a new therapy – without success.
The father of the family struggles to wean himself and his partner suffers from his instability.
For a month, Hunter Biden, who is staying in New Haven, Connecticut, scours seedy motels frequented by drug addicts.
Until he met Melissa Cohen.
Once again, it's a woman who will change everything.
In March 2019, Hunter, disillusioned, decides to live at the Petit Ermitage, a hotel in Los Angeles, and to slowly destroy himself there.
He ended up being blacklisted - alongside, he says, the likes of Britney Spears.
Meanwhile, he meets an artist there who puts him in contact with a South African model.
Hunter Biden and Melissa Cohen agree on a date.
Love at first sight is immediate.
“Bathed in the soft spring light of Los Angeles, huge sunglasses pulled up over honey blonde hair, revealing huge eyes of extraordinary blue, the one I assumed was Melissa looked in my direction and I flashed a big spontaneous smile
,
he says
.
I was floored."
Thanks to her, Hunter Biden agrees to fight headlong against his addictions.
Melissa confiscates his car keys, his phone, his computer and his wallet, then his crack.
He married her on May 17, 2019, in Los Angeles.
The following year, the couple gave birth to a baby boy named Beau.
But scandal is never far away.
On November 20, 2019, DNA tests confirm that Hunter Biden is also the father of an illegitimate child, born in August 2018 and conceived shortly after his split with Hallie Biden.
The mother, a stripper from Washington named Lunden Alexis Roberts, asks him for financial support.
Hunter refuses to recognize the child, but will be forced to pay child support.
The Ukrainian scandal
Joe Biden's son must also come under attack from the political side.
Donald Trump, his father's main opponent in the 2019 presidential campaign, made him a prime target.
“Where is Hunter?” tirelessly hammer the outgoing president and his supporters.
All wonder about the silence of the one they accuse of being involved in what Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's lawyer, calls the "Ukrainian conspiracy".
According to him, Joe Biden would have, in 2016, fired Victor Chokine, the attorney general at the time, while the latter was investigating Hunter Biden and the remuneration granted to him by Burisma.
However, even before the arrival of his son in the Ukrainian company, Joe Biden intended to dismiss Victor Chokine, whom he accused of not being effective enough in the fight against corruption within the country.
In the United States, the House of Representatives launched an investigation for
impeachment
proceedings on September 24, 2019 .
She intends to establish whether Donald Trump resorted to blackmail and froze significant military aid granted to Ukraine, in order to force local authorities to investigate Joe Biden and put his presidential campaign in difficulty.
In March 2020, Hunter Biden fell under the scope of a tax investigation – still in progress – relating to his remuneration within Burisma.
In the midst of the tumult, he gives an explosive interview to the
New Yorker,
where he discusses his past addictions and the Ukrainian scandal.
He refuses to be defeated: "I'm here," he says.
I have survived much worse.
I have known the peak of success and the abyss of decline.
Since the election of Joe Biden, he wanted to lurk in the shadow of a more discreet life.
Having become a painter, Hunter Biden intended to avoid any scandal that could splash his father.
Only downside, the sale of his paintings raises, among the detractors of the Head of State, questions about possible influence peddling.
The revelations around his evenings with escort girls did not help his affairs.
As if the seal of the scandal were to mark, forever, the life of the son of the president.