Hunter Biden’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle speaks out on their marriage,
financial woes – ABC News (go.com)
Readers know Kathleen Buhle better as Kathleen Biden, the long-suffering wife of Hunter, the brother who wasn’t Beau but who took up with his widow. Buhle excised Biden from her name in 2019, after enduring years of what many women could or would not: alcohol and drug abuse, affairs, public humiliation, a torrent of lies.
Now she’s written a memoir, “If We Break.” It is not revenge porn. It’s not even a tell-all. And obsessive Hunter gatherers out there, be warned, the book contains nary a mention of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma or the infamous laptop left at the Delaware repair shop. It ends long before those troubles. But, if you wish, you can read about them in his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things.”
Instead of matching towels, we have his-and-her memoirs.
Subtitled “A memoir of marriage, addiction, and healing,” the book is short on healing, while the addiction and masochism never appear to end. After Hunter’s fifth — or was it sixth? — visit to rehab, Buhle still accepts his lies. “Hunter told me he was going for the yoga workshops,” she explains of a trip he took to Big Sur. “Did I believe him? Not really. Did I try to stop him? No. Anything to do with his sobriety was still beyond questioning.”
In “If We Break,” Buhle reveals a talent for denial so deep that it is left to her teenage daughters to tell her that Hunter is having an affair with their aunt and Beau Biden’s widow, Hallie. They know because they found texts on his phone. Buhle’s friends later ask, “How could you have not even suspected?
You may have been the only one not to.” Ironically, it was Hallie who had warned Kathleen years earlier when she discovered photos of him with another woman at the Four Seasons in Paris: “If you leave him, Kathleen, he’ll find someone else, and then you’ll have to live with that.” (Eventually Hunter and Hallie split, too. He married Melissa Cohen, who is 17 years younger than he is, days after they met.)
After the Hallie telenovela-worthy bombshell, Buhle says that Hunter can no longer hurt her, that the worst is behind her. Reader, she is sorely mistaken.
The affair goes public in the New York Post, the tabloid that will turn Hunter’s lobbying exploits and role as a Burisma board member into something of a full-time beat. Buhle discovers that Hunter cruised the cheaters’ website Ashley Madison (Tag line: “Life is short. Have an affair.”), his cellphone bursting with sexually graphic texts to “dozens of women — none of whom I’d ever heard of before.”
Buhle and Biden met when she was 23 and they worked as members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon. A year later, she was pregnant, and they wed. Buhle grew
up solidly middle class, selling hot dogs at Comiskey Park. She refers to herself as “just a silly girl from Chicago” and lives up to the description by opting to learn little about their finances, a poor move. If Hunter has any talents, it is for lying and living well beyond their means: Tom Ford togs (in D.C., where few would take notice), new teeth while hooked on crack, insisting that he meet with a sobriety coach while staying at L.A.’s pricey Chateau Marmont.
The Biden family history is marked by tremendous tragedy and loss. Hunter’s mother & baby sister were killed in a car accident when he was 3 years old and Beau a year older. The two brothers were so close that when Hunter and Kathleen’s “special” marriage — that’s her term for it — goes off the rails, she turns to Beau for help because “he was the one who fully understood Hunter.”
Let that sink in.
The two sons were thick as thieves, but there’s no question that their father believed that Beau, his namesake and Delaware’s former attorney general who died of brain cancer in 2015, hung the moon and was his political heir. It could not have been easy being the Bidens’ Prince Harry. “I never saw Hunter show anything but pride toward his father and brother for their incredible accomplishments, but I wondered if their success took a toll on him,” Buhle writes.
Addiction has long been a scourge of the Biden family, and an inheritance. Asked on the 2008 campaign trail why he doesn’t imbibe, Joe Biden said, “There are enough alcoholics in my family.” Alas, there would be more.
And what do we learn of Joe and Jill Biden?
Buhle is cautious and loving, the challenge of publishing a memoir while your former in-laws and three daughters’ grandparents occupy the White House. The Bidens are loving and supportive, but it takes a long time for the truth of Hunter’s addiction to be shared.
In Buhle’s telling, the family is close, supportive and spends plenty of time together
but is not very open.
Jill Biden is perfect, gracious yet unknowable, a distant and largely offstage character.
At times, Joe Biden seems like regular folk in that he shops at Home Depot.
Then again, the Bidens do not seem that much like regular folk in that their Greenville, Del., home features a double staircase, a library with carved wooden nymphs and — wait for it — an actual ballroom. When Buhle’s bookie grandfather first visits, he asks, “Who’s buried here?” Hunter’s parents may share a talent for living above their means. Buhle notes that the home was “often behind on its upkeep, and whole sections were closed to save on heating costs.”
Buhle smartly consulted a professional writer, Susan Conley, and the prose is better than many books of its ilk. But “If We Break” seems padded. There are constant trivialities about how handsome Hunter looks in a suit and exchanges of “I love you” between the couple. Note to memoir authors: Don’t do this. The book clocks in at precisely 300 pages, as though dictated by contract.
Huma Abedin opens up about her marriage, the 2016 election and her #MeToo moment
This is the ex of a politician’s now-notorious son, a woman who claims no desire to be famous, guards her privacy, then publishes a memoir at precisely the moment when her former father-in-law is at the height of his power. Perhaps the experience provides some catharsis and revenue for Buhle, who leads a D.C. collaborative space for women and assists nonprofits. Perhaps it may offer solace for others in emotionally abusive relationships with alcoholics. But is this really a book the public is asking to read?
Karen Heller is a Washington Post national features writer.
The cover of Buhle’s memoir, which is being published today.
BOOK DESCRIPTION: Kathleen Buhle shares her story of resilience and
self-discovery after her marriage to Hunter Biden unraveled in the wake
of substance abuse and infidelity in this intimate, astonishing memoir.
“Kathleen Buhle’s brave and honest story transcends politics, division, hearsay, and judgment.”—Connie Britton
This is not a story about good versus evil. Or who was right. Or who was better.
For decades, Kathleen Buhle chose to play the role of the good wife, beginning when, as a naïve young woman from a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago, she met the dashing son of a senator at the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon. Within months of falling in love, Kathleen found herself pregnant and engaged, living a life beyond anything she’d ever known.
Determined to build her family on a foundation of love, Kathleen was convinced her
and Hunter’s commitment to each other could overcome any obstacle. But when Hunter’s drinking evolved into dependency, she was forced to learn how rapidly and irrevocably
a marriage can fall apart under the merciless power of addiction. When the lies became insurmountable, Kathleen was forced to reckon with the compromises she had made to try to save her marriage. She wondered if she could survive on her own.
The result is a memoir that is page-turning and heart-breaking. Here Kathleen asks
why she kept so much hidden—from her daughters and herself—for so many years, why she became dependent on one man, and why she was more faithful to a vow of secrecy than to her own truth. This inspiring chronicle of radical honesty and self-actualization speaks to women who have lost part of their identity and want to reclaim it.”
In her new memoir If We Break,
Kathleen Buhle doesn’t shy away from the ugly side of her 24-year marriage to
Hunter Biden and the ramifications it had on both her own mental health and that
of their three daughters, Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy.
In the book, Buhle shares that she first began noticing Hunter’s drinking might be a problem around 2001 after the birth of their second child when he took a job as a partner at a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. which led to a lot of late nights and long periods away from their home in Delaware. “I watched his drinking spiral from social to problematic,” she writes. Watching how much he could consume scared me…
“For the first time, I didn’t trust my husband.”
By the fall of 2003, Hunter entered rehab for the first time and, when he returned, the author says their marriage “felt stronger than ever.” But after seven years of sobriety, Hunter relapsed again only to deny it, forcing Buhle into the permanent role of sobriety detective. “As my suspicions grew, so did Hunter’s defensiveness,” she says.
“He made me think that I must be crazy, when what I wanted from him was honesty.
But I didn’t know how to ask for it.”
When Hunter returned home after ultimately agreeing to a second stint in rehab in 2012, Buhle says she tried to “restart our marriage…We weren’t fighting, not in the beginning. We just seemed to be drifting. From the outside, everything was as it should be…
But inside, at home, we weren’t sharing.” And by the spring of 2013, she began to notice the warning signs that he was drinking again. “I didn’t trust my husband.
And he didn’t trust me, either, as if my own suspicion about him made me suspect…Sometimes I even believed that it was my own skepticism about him that was the problem,” she writes, blaming herself for driving her husband even further into his addiction.
After Beau Biden was diagnosed with a fatal form of brain cancer,
Buhle watches again as her husband’s drinking becomes “worse than ever,” finding beer cans and vodka bottles scattered throughout their home. She begins to lose faith that he’ll ever be able to stop. “Each time he drank, the process of getting him to admit he wasn’t sober took longer and was more exhausting,” she says. “The denials grew angrier and more bitter too. For the first time, Hunter was calling me names.” And as Beau’s disease worsened, Buhle writes, “Hunter’s drinking was obvious in the darkest, angriest way.”
After over a decade spent grappling with her husband’s alcoholism, Buhle admits that the reality that Hunter might also be using drugs had never even occurred to her. That is until he confessed in late 2013 that, earlier that summer, he had failed a drug test necessary to join the Navy, testing positive for cocaine—a drug he completely denies having taken. Years later, following Beau’s passing, Buhle would also discover evidence that Hunter was smoking crack, finding a broken glass pipe in an ashtray in their home after a night of binge-drinking, and later discovering a pipe and small baggie filled with a white substance hidden in their car. But by then, Buhle writes, “After years of thinking it couldn’t get worse, I’d lost the ability to be surprised by him.”
As though dealing with Hunter’s alcoholism and drug addiction wasn’t enough of a challenge for their relationship to withstand, Buhle also discovers evidence of his infidelity years before he would get caught cheating on her with his late brother’s wife, Hallie.
After Buhle finds photos on his iPad of a robe-clad woman in his Paris hotel room, Hunter eventually admits that he’s cheated on her five times over the course of their marriage, claiming that they were “All prostitutes. All outside the country,” and only when he was drinking.
Buhle admits that not only did her enmeshment with her husband keep her from leaving him, but she was also advised by Hallie that if she left him she would only come to regret it as Hunter would surely move on with someone else. Buhle’s therapist also told her at the time that “he didn’t think Hunter would be able to handle losing Beau and me at the same time.” So, she decides to stay. But just as the author begins to finally forgive him for his past indiscretions, Hunter begins pulling away from her again, spending more and more time with Hallie and her children following Beau’s passing. She notices that Hallie also begins to treat her more coldly. After years of friendship and family holidays, Buhle writes, “For the first time, she seemed truly tired of me. Soon she’d stop responding to me at all. One of my last texts to her said that I didn’t understand what was happening and that
I felt like I was being punished. I didn’t hear back.”
A year after Beau’s death,
Buhle finally discovers the true nature of Hunter and Hallie’s relationship when their middle daughter Finnegan reads a text conversation between them on Hunter’s phone. “Hunter’s relapses, Beau’s diagnosis, the cheating—each of these moments had brought a powerful, visceral wave of emotion,” she writes. “But this news, in some ways the most damning, seemed to sit placidly on the surface…I felt a strange sense of vindication.
Not only had I not been crazy, but it was so much worse than I could have imagined.”
She adds that as she continued to go through his phone and found even more evidence of affairs with other women, “Something shifted in me. For so long I’d held on to some idea of love for the man I’d married. But that night, I felt no love for him at all…I didn’t feel sentimental. I just wanted to close this painful chapter.” Buhle also notes that while this was obviously a traumatizing experience for their children, it was also “serendipity that
the girls had found it. Because finally I didn’t have to keep another lie from them.
As painful as finding the phone was, it set us free from all of the secrets.”
After filing for divorce in 2016,
Buhle begins the slow process of taking back control over her own life after 23 years as
a stay-at-home mom, including over her own finances, only to discover that they had no savings whatsoever. “Both our houses had a double mortgage and no equity. We had credit card debt and medical bills. We were in terrible financial shape. The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me. We owed as much for both houses as when we’d bought them.
We were underwater,” she writes. But rather than blame Hunter for their lack of financial stability, Buhle recognizes her own accountability in the situation.
Early on in the memoir, shortly after their marriage, she notes “For the next 15 years,
I’d leave every financial decision to Hunter, trusting his judgment in many cases ignoring warning signs that we were in over our heads.” She adds, “If Hunter said we were okay, that was good enough for me. He would figure out our finances while I continued that willful ignorance I first adopted when we bought the house on Centre Road [in Delaware]. In this way Hunter had all the pressure, with no partner, when it came to financially supporting our family. I know now what a burden that must have been for him.”
Buhle goes on to admit that it was that very dependency on Hunter that was partially to blame for the demise of their marriage. She writes, “From the beginning, needing each other became part of the language of our love, and soon my sense of value and self-forth came almost entirely from that need.” In fact, her identity and sense of self-worth became “more and more linked to who I was married to and less about me.”
Secrecy is another theme that runs throughout the book, not only in terms of Hunter’s addiction but also the lies Buhle told in order to keep up the facade of their happy, problem-free family.
“I became adept at hiding the truth, at lying. To the girls.
To the outside world. To my friends and my family and to myself,” she says.
“In the end, it shouldn’t be surprising that [Hunter] never realized his addiction’s impact on our family, because I never really told him.”
But Buhle’s challenges do not end with the culmination of her marriage. Following the finalization of their divorce in 2017, she discovers that she has stage 3 colon cancer. Yet, here too, the author finds the silver lining in having to undergo surgery and chemotherapy. “Eventually, I began to accept my limits in a way I hadn’t before,” she writes. “The need to prove myself while I had cancer just became too heavy to lift. I didn’t have the energy to care as much. Without my realizing it, cancer had reprioritized my life. It cleared a lot of the clutter and self-doubt and slowly put everything into new perspective.”
As she begins her recovery process, the writer realizes that the final step in her journey of self-actualization is changing her last name from Biden back to her maiden name, Buhle. She says, “The changed name was a physical manifestation of my reclaimed sense of self.
It signified that I was strong enough now to stand on my own. At the same time, it was a farewell letter to the old Hunter, the young man I had met in Portland, Oregon, and the young woman who’d fallen so hard in love.”
Watch June 14, 2022, Good Morning America TV Show – ABC.com
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U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time (usdebtclock.org)
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