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Inside the troubled relationships of Hunter Biden, the only son of former US President Joe Biden

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21st May, 2025 18:45 IST
It’s not the first time Hunter Biden has dominated headlines — but it might be the most bruising. Amid the many issues that weighed down former President Joe Biden’s time in office, none cut closer to home than the personal and legal troubles of his only surviving son.

From federal convictions for illegally buying a gun while using drugs to felony tax charges, Hunter's name has become a political lightning rod. And now, once again, he's under intense scrutiny — not from a Republican opponent, but from CNN anchor Jake Tapper .

While promoting his new book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Tapper didn’t hold back. On Katie Couric’s podcast Next Question, he called Hunter Biden “unethical,” “sleazy,” and someone who “acted like the chief of staff of the family,” despite his troubling history. He pointed to one example in particular — a past relationship that shocked even those who had followed Hunter’s story from the start.

“Just look at the record: After his brother died, he cheated on his wife with his brother's widow and then got her addicted to crack. That’s just one thing I could say. I don't have a lot of personal regard for him," Tapper said.


A troubled childhoodBorn in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1970 to Joe and Neilia Biden, Robert Hunter Biden was just two years old when tragedy struck. A truck crashed into the Biden family car in December 1972, killing his mother and infant sister Naomi. Hunter survived with a fractured skull, while his older brother Beau suffered a broken leg. Joe Biden, then a newly elected senator, was sworn in beside his sons' hospital beds.

Hunter went on to attend Georgetown University and later Yale Law School, graduating in 1996. It is around this time that he started battling addiction , starting with alcohol in his teens and later cocaine as a college student. Despite entering rehab several times, his struggles with substance abuse persisted.

In 2013, while his father was vice president, Hunter joined the Navy Reserve. But on his very first day, he tested positive for cocaine and was discharged.

His downward spiral worsened after Beau Biden’s death from brain cancer in 2015. According to The New Yorker, Hunter began drinking heavily and isolating himself. “He and Beau were one,” his daughter Naomi once posted on X. “One heart, one soul, one mind.”

Amid personal devastation, Hunter’s romantic life unraveled in public view — and each relationship only deepened the chaos.

Kathleen Buhle: The first marriage and its falloutHunter married Kathleen Buhle, a lawyer, in 1993 after meeting her through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. The couple had three daughters — Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy. But the marriage began to crumble under the weight of Hunter's addiction and infidelity.

Kathleen later told Good Morning America that she discovered he was struggling with “a massive drug addiction,” and called it heartbreaking. She alleged he was spending extravagantly on his own pleasures while leaving the family in financial distress.

Their divorce was finalized in 2017, and Hunter would later admit in his memoir Beautiful Things that his infidelity was the “final straw.”

Hallie Biden: A relationship born of griefJust as his marriage ended, Hunter began a relationship that shocked many — with Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau.

The two bonded over shared grief. "I was at my lowest, [Hallie] was at her neediest, and we clung to each other with abandon," Hunter wrote about a period in the fall of 2016 after he'd been through a stint in rehab. "By the time we returned to Delaware at the end of the week, we were no longer just two people bound by shared grief.

But the relationship quickly spiraled. Hallie would later testify in court that Hunter introduced her to crack cocaine and used drugs in her presence. She described him as “agitated” and “high-strung” while using. In his memoir, Hunter admitted their romance was “a giant miscalculation” and a “failure of epic proportions.”

One moment from their time together stands out for its sheer recklessness: after finding Hunter’s unregistered .38-caliber revolver, Hallie panicked and threw it in a grocery store trash can. When asked by Hunter, she returned to retrieve it, however it was gone. The incident led to a police report — and, years later, a federal gun charge.

They split in 2019, just days after Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign.

Lunden Roberts That same year, a DNA test revealed that Hunter was the biological father of a child born to Lunden Roberts, a former exotic dancer from Arkansas. The child, Navy Joan Roberts, is now six years old — and, as of 2025, had still never met her father.

Joe Biden initially did not publicly acknowledge Navy, sparking criticism. It wasn’t until mid-2023 that the president referred to her as his seventh grandchild.

Melissa Cohen : A whirlwind romanceHunter’s most recent romantic chapter began just a week after his split with Hallie. In May 2019, he married South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen, after knowing her for only six days.

The couple share a young son and have largely stayed out of the public eye. But the relationship began under the same cloud of instability that followed his previous ones.

From a traumatic childhood to drug addiction and a string of turbulent relationships, Hunter Biden’s personal life has been lived in the harshest of spotlights — made even brighter by his father’s political prominence.

While his story is one of loss and addiction, critics like Jake Tapper see more than just tragedy — they see manipulation, recklessness, and a family dynamic that blurred the line between support and enabling.

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