The escapades of Joe Biden's son, Hunter, who has long battled drug and alcohol addictions, have regularly hit the headlines.
So much so that he was often seen as a potential handicap to his father's political career.
This time, things could well restore the image of the 46th president of the United States.
This Tuesday, October 11, the
Daily Mail
unveiled a voicemail, left on October 15, 2018 by Joe Biden on his younger brother's answering machine.
We hear the politician, on the verge of tears, begging Hunter for help, when the latter has just bought a weapon and is having serious problems with drugs.
"It's dad.
I'm calling to tell you that I love you.
I love you more than the whole world, buddy.
You have to get help, laments Joe Biden.
I know you don't know what to do... Me neither.
Three days earlier, Hunter Biden had indeed purchased a .38 caliber pistol from a gun shop in Wilmington, Delaware.
And this, even though he was a drug addict at the time.
This weapon will end up in the trash of a grocery store, after being found and then thrown away by Halie Biden, the widow of her brother Beau, who gradually became Hunter's confidante and then companion.
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Fox News' anti-Biden campaign
In the United States, the recording is already making a lot of noise.
Especially since Fox News tried to use it to compromise the president.
"It's really sad," quipped conservative channel commentator Sean Hannity.
Before denouncing Joe Biden's support for his son, when the latter hid his drug addiction to be able to obtain the weapon: "This voice message would have arrived exactly when Hunter had just lied in his request to buy a weapon. fire."
When buying the gun, Hunter Biden had indeed indicated in a form not to use illegal drugs.
Problem: in his autobiography, published in 2021, the main interested party admitted to being addicted to crack at the same time.
Fox News' anti-Biden campaign obviously did not have the desired effect.
On the contrary, Joe Biden's message of love to his son moved Americans.
“Fox News probably thought that airing that voicemail was going to do his father a disservice.
It's just the opposite”, observes the independent journalist Théo Laubry.
Hunter Biden: confessions and addictions
In his autobiography
Les Belles Choses
, published in September 2021, Hunter Biden lifts the veil on his addiction problems.
He reveals there to have sunk into alcoholism in the early 2000s. “I have always been able to drink five times more than the others”, confided the youngest son of Joe Biden.
An addiction that he managed to fight after many rehabs and meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous.
In November 2010, it's the relapse.
A few months earlier, her brother Beau was admitted to hospital with a "mild attack".
Three years later, doctors diagnosed the eldest Biden with a brain tumor: Hunter Biden, who was then living in Washington, started drinking between “twelve and sixteen hours in a row”.
He was soon 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, a powerful 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 finally died on June 6, 2015 at the age of 46 in a hospital room, surrounded by his father, his brother and their family.
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A revival in 2019
A year later, Hunter begins yet another rehab.
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.
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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.
Until his meeting with Melissa Cohen, whom he will marry in 2019. To date, officially in any case, Hunter Biden is sober.