by Hunter Biden
I’d left my wallet in the rental car. It contained my brother’s AG badge, which I carried everywhere, as well as a Secret Service business card I still had even though I’d canceled my security detail several years earlier. A Hertz employee cleaning out the car found some paraphernalia and a white-powder residue on an armrest. After googling my name and Beau’s, the manager called the local police—who called the Secret Service, who called my dad, who, I presume, called Hallie, since she was the only person who knew where I was. I’d left my cell phone in the car, too, so Hallie got in touch with Joey, who took care of things from there. I eventually got everything back.
The Prescott police called Grace Grove to inquire about me but dropped their investigation. I didn’t know anything about it until I got out of bed around day four, and dismissed it all as ridiculous. Despite the speculation in the right-wing media to the contrary, the cops weren’t strong-armed into dropping the case. As the Prescott city attorney, a man who served twenty years in the Arizona National Guard and had been deployed to Afghanistan, later told the New Yorker, “It’s a very Republican area. I don’t think political favors would even work, had they been requested.”
Still, the commotion freaked out the folks at Grace Grove, who knew I was there to recover from drug addiction but had no idea how bad it was. They asked if I had anything on me, worried the cops would show up and nose around. They went through my bag and pulled out all of my drug paraphernalia. Morgan then packed up everything I had and drove off into the high red-rock desert, where he buried it all with a kind of ceremonial earnestness, per the Grace Grove vibe.
He returned to the center several hours later, looking like he’d seen a ghost. His tanned, weathered face was ashen. When I asked what happened, he told me that while burying the instruments of my addiction he’d become violently ill. He then passed out and had apocalyptic visions. His dream’s prevailing image, he said: four horsemen wielding scythes atop fire-snorting steeds that were stampeding straight toward me.
I didn’t know what the hell to say to that—didn’t know whether to laugh or tremble. But the more he talked, the less it mattered. Whether what he saw was prophecy, revelation, or quackery, it struck me as a dead-on metaphor for how I experienced the power of crack and addiction.
Just days earlier, I’d flown over an interstate highway, and only hours after that I’d followed a mammoth bird through pitch-black mountain passes—all to escape the thing that had been chasing me most of my adult life. When I contemplate battling my addiction now, the image I conjure up is of that terrorizing band of skeletal night riders—the Four Horsemen of the Crackocalypse.
I got a lot better during the rest of my stay. I ate properly, meditated, attended a hypnotherapy session, and got cleanses. I didn’t smoke crack for the first time in at least fourteen days.
After a week, I left Grace Grove and checked into Mii Amo, a nearby resort spa. Feeling physically and mentally purged, I phoned Hallie and asked if she would come to Arizona to pick me up. I wanted her to accompany me on the trip back. I didn’t trust myself to make it home without backsliding—without taking a detour into the pit I fell into on my way there.
She flew out the next day. I was at my lowest, she was at her neediest, and we clung to each other with abandon. We talked at length about how much we had come to rely on each other, how our health and well-being seemed dependent on the love we’d grown to share.
There’s no question about the unseen force in the middle of it all: Beau. It seems obvious now, but then it was this unspoken, unacknowledged dynamic that had begun to impel us both: the idea that we could keep Beau alive by being together—that by loving each other we somehow could love him back into existence.
By the time we returned to Delaware at the end of the week, we were no longer just two people bound by shared grief.
We were a couple.
* * *
If ever there was a star-crossed coupling, it was ours. It made perfect sense except for how it made no sense at all. We returned from Arizona determined to make a go of it, though I’m not sure either of us understood what that meant. It was an affair built on need, hope, frailty, and doom.
The fact is, Hallie and I weren’t close before Beau died. I remember being surprised when Beau married her. As a bachelor, he was much sought after by single women within a thousand-mile radius, and he kept his relationships close to the vest. When Beau lived upstairs in the Delaware house Kathleen and I first bought, Hallie’s older sister, whom we knew growing up, came around all the time and Hallie just seemed to tag along. I first saw a connection between her and Beau while he studied for the bar exam, which he had to retake several times (the Delaware bar is notoriously difficult). When he went into lockdown mode, she was both attentive and compassionate. Clearly, there was something there.
She really stepped up in 2001, after Beau returned from postwar Kosovo, where he’d served as a legal advisor who helped train civil and criminal justice officials. He’d contracted a virus there that triggered ankylosing spondylitis, commonly known as bamboo spine, a horrific genetic disorder that causes bones in the back to freeze up, like acute arthritis. Beau was treated with Humira, then an experimental drug, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. It proved effective, and Hallie tended to him throughout his treatment and recovery. They married a year after that.
At times, interactions between Hallie and Kathleen could get a little tense. Hallie confided to me that the night before their wedding, Beau told her, “Make it right. You need to because my brother means more to me than anything.”
As couples—Hallie and Beau, Kathleen and me—we were together all the time. We spent every holiday together, every vacation together. Beau and Kathleen grew close. They laughed with each other all the time, a couple of practical jokesters for whom I was an easy target. Somewhere there’s a photo of the two of them dangling a Thanksgiving turkey leg over my wide-open mouth as I lie sound asleep on a vacation-home couch. I loved it.
Hallie and I had none of that. We didn’t have much in common, didn’t even have much to talk about. She wasn’t consumed by politics, wasn’t devoted to the same issues that I was. But she’s incredibly alluring—her wide eyes and flashing Cheshire cat smile are hypnotic. I could see why my brother fell for her. Hallie was proud of Beau and what they built as a family. That’s what satisfied her in every way.
Beau’s death tilted everyone’s equilibrium in a manner I don’t think any of us could have predicted. Life trajectories became entangled and dependent on others in whole new ways because of the outsized role Beau played in so many of our lives.
After the funeral, Hallie showed me a deep sense of compassion in making certain I took care of Beau’s memory as he would’ve wished, most notably by helping her start the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children. She also allowed me to be there for Natalie and little Hunter, just as Beau wanted.
Our relationship started with me staying at Hallie’s house to help with the kids. I fell right into the role. Driving the two hours between DC and Delaware, I’d get there in the early evening, in time for dinner or to take the kids to their soccer games. I’d then help put them to bed, often telling them stories about their dad; Natalie, especially, loved to hear tales about Beau and me growing up. I slept on a Murphy bed in the den, then took them to school in the morning before I headed back to Washington for work and my outpatient rehab. As time went on, we traveled as a pack to the movies, Sunday mass, the beach.
I was seduced by the idea of providing the same kind of extended family that surrounded Beau and me after we lost our mommy and sister, when Aunt Val lived with us and Uncle Jim converted our garage into an apartment. I’d even suggested to Kathleen after Beau’s funeral that we move as a family into Hallie’s Delaware house. That went nowhere.
My motivations were wrapped up in those kids. It all became about making sure I was there for them in the way I knew my brother would be there for my girls under the same
circumstances. I knew in my bones what Natalie and Hunter were feeling because I felt it, too. We had a unique relationship. I was part of raising my brother’s kids before he died. I was a central person in their lives. It was the same relationship Beau had with my daughters. I never held back anything around Beau’s kids, whether to counsel or reprimand them, and the same was true with him. My girls would talk with Beau about something that was bothering them as much as they would come to me, and Natalie and Hunter sought me out as much as they did their dad.
I didn’t want to replace my brother. God knows I could never do that. But I did want to feel his presence. I did want to be reminded of him and thought that by being there with his children I could somehow resurrect that love.
Looking back, it’s hard to tell if it was selflessness or selfishness on my part. I just don’t know.
After Hallie and I returned from Sedona in the fall of 2016, our relationship remained a work in progress. We kept it to ourselves while we figured out where it might be headed.
That didn’t last long. After our trip, Kathleen found texts between Hallie and me on an old iPad that I must have left at the house. That gave her the gift of justification: I was the sicko sleeping with my brother’s wife.
Everything blew up after that.
* * *
On February 23, 2017, two months after Kathleen had filed for divorce, she filed a motion in DC Superior Court to freeze my assets. It was leaked to Page Six, the gossip sheet of the New York Post. A week later, the news leaked that Hallie and I were dating. A Post reporter called to ask me to confirm or deny the relationship. It put me—us—in a box. A denial would make a lie out of what we were working on. A confirmation would unleash the tabloid world on our doorstep.
I opted for a straightforward affirmation. I said, honestly, that Hallie and I were “incredibly lucky to have found the love and support we have for each other in such a difficult time.”
I asked my dad to make a statement, too, as a way to break it to the rest of our family. He’d left the vice president’s office only a month earlier.
“Dad,” I told him, “if people find out, but they think you’re not approving of this, it makes it seem wrong. The kids have to know that there’s nothing wrong with this, and the one person who can tell them that is you.”
He was reluctant but finally said he’d do whatever I thought was best. His statement to the paper: “We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness. They have mine and Jill’s full and complete support and we are happy for them.”
The story ran the next day, on March 1, under a headline that blared: BEAU BIDEN’S WIDOW HAVING AFFAIR WITH HIS MARRIED BROTHER.
It was the beginning of the end. Hallie was mortified. We became a tabloid drama narrated by the likes of the Post, TMZ, and the Daily Mail. Paparazzi tailed us nonstop. Our relationship wasn’t just out in the open around Wilmington. It was on seventy-eight front pages around the world, from Thailand to the Czech Republic to Cincinnati.
Our lives of quiet desperation were suddenly on full display. I was madly trying to hold on to a slice of my brother, and I think Hallie was doing the same. Neither of us had yet thought of the relationship as a long-term or permanent commitment until it was made public, and then neither of us was prepared to let the other go. The spotlight forced us to make decisions we didn’t want to make; if you’ve gone far enough to admit that you’re in a relationship with your deceased brother’s widow, or your deceased husband’s brother, you’d better be all in. If we weren’t all in, we worried, the relationship would be perceived as a salacious fling. So we tried to make something work that, in hindsight, was never in the cards.
Fallout rained down everywhere. My daughters were devastated. I lost nearly all of my clients and I had to resign from the World Food Program USA. Almost everything I had business-wise or that was a passion of mine evaporated. Worse yet, I had started backsliding within months after returning from Sedona; had I been clean and sober, I might have dealt with all this more effectively. I might have prevented it from turning into something other than the dumpster fire it ultimately became.
* * *
Hallie and I didn’t live together full-time until the end of that summer, when we moved to Annapolis. We wanted to get away from the fishbowl in Wilmington, while staying close enough for me to commute to Washington and to see my girls. It would be a fresh start. We rented a house and enrolled Natalie and Hunter in school there.
It was a bust right off the bat. I made it almost impossible for Hallie to get healthy as related to her grief and other issues she was dealing with, and she made it nearly impossible for me to do the same. It was a giant miscalculation on both our parts, errors in judgment born of a uniquely tragic time.
The truth is, neither of us could be trusted with making a proper cup of coffee, let alone making relationship choices while paparazzi jostled for a peek through our windows. We both were too enmeshed in our own problems to be capable of helping each other. As much as we desperately thought we could be the answers to each other’s pain, we only caused each other more.
For Hallie, I was a constant reminder of what she once had and then lost. The life I was living was the antithesis of the life my brother had provided for her. I was in the throes of addiction. I was hardly present. I refused to be around when I was using because I didn’t want to expose her and the kids to it, so I stayed away for long stretches. I kept making commitments to getting clean, and I would get clean, until I wasn’t anymore.
For me, proximity to my brother’s kids was at the top of the list of obligations I thought I owed to Beau. In reality, Natalie and Hunter needed their own time to heal, without being reminded of what wasn’t there. As much as I could look and sound like Beau—as much physical and psychic DNA as we shared—I would never be able to replace their father. That was never my intent, of course, but it’s also not the kind of thing that kids that young needed to be burdened with figuring out on their own.
Undoubtedly, my failures to get straight made everything harder. One thing every child needs is consistency, especially a child who has lost a beloved parent. Nothing in my life then provided for that.
Less than three months after we’d all moved in together, I essentially moved out. After a brief hiatus, during which I got sober, we tried it again in January. It was a new year—2018—and a clean slate. We rented a different house and enrolled the kids in school for another semester. It was hard for us to accept that we had misjudged things so badly, especially with all that Natalie and Hunter had already gone through.
That do-over lasted two weeks.
It felt like a failure of epic proportions. Our relationship had begun as a mutually desperate grasping for the love we both had lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy. It made the obvious clear: What was gone was gone permanently. There was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
That realization made it all the more difficult to pretend it could be otherwise, which made it all the more difficult for me to get clean. My oasis was gone.
What the fuck was I going to do now?
CHAPTER NINE CALIFORNIA ODYSSEY
I used my superpower—finding crack anytime, anywhere—less than a day after landing at LAX in the spring of 2018.
I drove my rental to the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood, where I checked into a bungalow and by 4 a.m. had smoked every crumb of crack I’d brought. The clubs whose bouncers had served as my primary sources were closed, my calls to Curtis went unanswered, and my valet connection was AWOL.
I remembered a small crew of panhandlers who perpetually hung around a row of stores across from another club, near the corner of Sunset and La Brea, about a mile away. Like any worthy crack haunt by this point, it set off my spidey sense. When I pulled into the parking lot, there they were: a handful of guys loitering around a dumpster near the back. They’d improvised a small encampment of sleeping bags. They wer
e clearly users.
I walked up and asked if they had anything that they’d sell. They did not and, at that hour, had no interest in looking elsewhere. Another guy from the group stepped out of the adjoining convenience store. He said he was sorry, that he didn’t have anything, either, but he knew where to get some. He said we’d have to drive downtown.
He was about fifty and looked like he’d just gotten out of jail—in fact, he told me he’d been released that day. He kept pulling up his pants because he hadn’t gotten a belt yet, and he carried everything he owned in a plastic CVS bag. That made him just desperate enough to get in a car with a stranger who easily could have been a cop.
I was just desperate enough to invite him in.
We hardly talked during the twenty-minute drive. He told me his name and that he’d served in the Air Force. Once we got downtown, past Pershing Square, he directed me through the deserted streets of the city’s flower and fashion districts. Office and bodega storefronts were locked up tight. In the predawn darkness, a vast homeless enclave bloomed along the sidewalks on both sides of the street. Bunched together, block after block after block: pop-up tents, leaning cardboard boxes, tarps.
The scene looked postapocalyptic—or at least post–American Century. The area seemed darker than the rest of the city we’d just passed through, almost de-electrified, like the primitive dwellings that covered so much prime real estate. Trash littered the streets and the heavy, warm air stank of garbage and rot and sweat. Random shopping carts were piled high with a lifetime’s worth of possessions; most of their owners were passed out nearby. The only cars I saw were police cruisers. We slid by at least three in the first few minutes after we arrived. A spooky silence added an even eerier atmosphere.
