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
