Hunter Biden: Who Is Joe Biden’s Son?

Robert Hunter Biden — who goes by Hunter — is the second son of former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s late wife, Neilia. A graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Law School, Hunter Biden has enjoyed a variety jobs, from being a policy director in the Clinton administration to founding a boutique consulting firm with former Sen. John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz.

According to The New Yorker, Biden was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and went to Archmere Academy, a Catholic high school attended by both his father and his older brother, Beau. When Biden was just 2 years old, he was in a car crash with his mother, brother, and younger sister Naomi, while his father was in Washington, D.C., preparing for his first term as a U.S. senator. Although Biden and his brother survived, his mother and sister were fatally injured. Unfortunately, Beau Biden passed away in 2015 from a brain tumor. He also has a half-sister, Ashley — the result of his father’s second marriage to Jill Biden.

Hunter Biden Has Five Kids

Biden was married to Kathleen Buhle for 24 years and they have three daughters — Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy, per The New Yorker. In 2015, he and Buhle separated and she filed for divorce in 2016, which was made official in February 2017. He then proceeded to date the wife of his late brother, Hallie Olivere, from 2016 to 2018. However, the scrutiny he was under as a result of dating his brother’s wife caused the two to split. Biden maintains that his father did not disapprove of the relationship, although he himself stated he was only making things worse by pursuing Olivere.

“All we got was sh*t from everybody, all the time,” Biden told The New Yorker. “It was really hard. And I realized that I’m not helping anybody by sticking around.”

In May 2019, he married his current wife, Melissa Cohen, after knowing her less than a week. The two welcomed a baby boy in late March, as reported by People.

Biden also has a child with Lunden Roberts, according to DNA test results. He allegedly met Roberts in D.C. while she was a student at The George Washington University, according to a second People report. Although he initially denied having any relations with Roberts, per the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, he agreed in March to child support payments. Aside from stating the child was born in August 2018, Roberts has refused to give any identifying information about them, citing privacy concerns.

Biden Struggles With Substance Abuse Problems

As detailed in The New Yorker, Biden has struggled throughout most of his life with substance abuse. He told the publication he first started socially drinking when he was a teenager, a process he kept up with in college. He also admitted to first experimenting with cocaine and crack while attending Georgetown. According to him, his excessive drinking is what caused the downfall of his first marriage. Buhle would ask him to be sober for a month — which he would do — “but, on day thirty-one, I’d be right back to it,” he said. He checked himself into Crossroads Centre Antigua and his brother accompanied him to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in D.C.

In May 2013 — at 43 years old — Biden received a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Navy, reported CNN. He received waivers for both his age and his previous drug use, which would have typically disqualified him from entering the service. However, he was soon found to have had cocaine in his system and was discharged in February 2014. Although Biden maintains his innocence — stating he asked for cigarettes from two people the day before the test, which must have been tainted — he also said he knew how his history would look to a review board, so he didn’t pursue the issue.

That wasn’t the first time he had purportedly relapsed though. The New Yorker article wrote Biden had broken his sobriety in 2010, after seven years. He checked himself into rehab in 2011, then again in 2013 when he resumed drinking once more.

Biden’s next significant relapse came after his brother’s death. In 2013, Beau Biden was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a type of brain tumor. He passed away in 2015, which caused Hunter Biden to spiral out of control. His marriage to Buhle ended, and he moved to Los Angeles, where he engaged in destructive behavior.

Recently, however, he has been maintaining his health. He has taken up painting again, an activity that “is literally keeping me sane,” he told The New York Times. He said he had taken to painting as a form of therapy to escape temptation.

“I was addicted to crack for four years. I went through a really long period of addiction and I was at a point where I didn’t read, write, think.”

Biden had been accepted to Syracuse University’s creative writing program, but chose to go to law school to support his family, according to The New Yorker. Over the past year, though, he has started getting back into his creative pursuits, even looking for a gallery to exhibit his work.