WASHINGTON – Kathleen Buhle, the ex-wife of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, says she has “total control over my life now,” five years after her divorce, as she opens up about her marriage in a new memoir.
Buhle describes her ex-husband's drug addiction, her response to his infidelity — including an affair with her widowed sister-in-law — and her challenges integrating into the Biden family. Excerpts of “If We Break” were published Wednesday by People magazine.
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In the book, Buhle describes the pain she felt watching Hunter spiral into addiction, even as he denied it, and how “it became my own addiction" to document it. She writes that the couple separated not long after Beau Biden's 2015 death from brain cancer, when Buhle found a crack pipe in their ashtray.
Buhle said she found out about Hunter Biden's affair with Hallie Biden, Beau's widow, in Nov. 2016, after her daughters asked the family's therapist to tell her.
“I was shocked, but not heartbroken. Heartbreak has already flatted my self-esteem that past year,” she writes. She says her daughters discovered the relationship when searching through texts on Hunter's phone.
Buhle told People that she and Hunter “come together in our shared love for our daughters,” as they prepare for their eldest daughter Naomi's wedding at the White House this November.
While Hunter's finances are under investigation by the Justice Department, Buhle told People that “I couldn't be of any help," adding, “I kept my head so deeply buried in the sand on our finances."
After Biden became President Barack Obama's vice president in 2008, Buhle writes experiencing “one frequent reminder I wasn't a true Biden,” when a Secret Service agent informed the family that her then-husband and daughters would receive round-the-clock protection, but not her.
Buhle, in 2019, legally reclaimed her maiden name, which she said once felt like a “crown and shield to me.”
“I was no longer a Biden,” she writes. “I’d handed in my crown and shield because I no longer needed them. Maybe I never had.”