I longed for a connection with someone outside of addiction’s airless bubble—someone with whom I had no past, no baggage, and to whom I owed neither explanations nor apologies. I wanted to have conversations with someone who wasn’t a dealer or gangbanger or bouncer or stripper. Three years earlier, even as I’d craved those hotel mini-bottles of vodka in Amman, I could still sit across from the king of Jordan and discuss the plight of Syrian refugees, Middle East dynamics, and the existential obligations of being a great man’s son. I thought then that maybe that was my addiction’s low point—I thought that was the sound of me hitting bottom.
Back then, I still hoped to paint again, still hoped my journal entries could someday turn into a book, still dreamed of hugging my daughters tight every day. If I could find some new treatment, some new approach, some new… lifeline, I thought I could still claw my way back out.
During the nearly four years of active addiction that preceded this trip to California, which included a half dozen rehab attempts, that’s what I told myself after each failure. As bad as it got, I believed what Beau had believed: good or bad, it was all part of the process.
Stepping off the plane this time at LAX, however, it was clear that all of the options I once clung to were now pipe dreams. I consciously stopped even pretending I would get better. I dove headfirst into the void.
It’s hard to describe just how paralyzed and hopeless you can become in your addiction, how you can reach depths you never thought possible, and then drop even further—in this case, uncomprehendingly further. This period felt more dangerous, more fatally alluring, than any time before. I surrendered completely to my grimmest impulses. I was like someone picking out a firearm in a pawn shop, fully aware I was choosing a certain kind of death.
Disappearing was the only thing that gave me solace. It meant an end to pain. It meant I didn’t need to think about how much I was disappointing my brother, even though I knew Beau would never think of it that way. I quit writing him letters, feeling as if I didn’t have anything authentic to communicate to him anymore. Disappearing meant freedom from feeling. Thinking that you have something to live for obligates you to muster the courage and energy to fight.
I didn’t want to fight.
I finally silenced the dialogue that I’d kept up inside my head about getting clean and rebuilding my life. It was ridiculously easy: I just drowned it out with more and more drugs. Now I never thought, as I always had at some point in the midst of my previous binges, I’m just going to do this until… I no longer said until. I no longer finished the sentence. I gave up on everything. I stopped trying to fool others into thinking I was okay. I stopped trying to fool myself.
I was done with finding my way back into the world I had known my whole life. I was done trying to figure out how to return to a law firm. Done with the world of politics, of figuring out how to go out on the campaign trail with Dad, if it came to that, as I would have in any other election year. Done coming up with excuses for why I lived where I was living and why I did what I was doing.
I was a crack addict and that was that.
Fuck it.
My first call off the plane was to a drug connection.
I took an Uber to my car, which I’d stored in the garage of someone who managed a place I had stayed at. (Side note: this being an L.A. friend at that time, he had tried to sell the car.) I went straight from there to pick up some crack.
The next month and a half is a drug-befuddled blur. That’s not a dodge or a lapse in memory. Everything that followed my return to L.A. was a genuine, dictionary-definition blur of complete and utter debauchery. I was doing nothing but drinking and drugging.
I spent the first couple of weeks at an Airbnb in Malibu. It was around then that Rudy Giuliani began his ad hominem attacks against me, in anticipation of my father’s run for president. They centered on my work for Burisma, with dubious details collected from his “interviews”—that is, drunken lunches and dinners—with former Ukrainian prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko, both of whom have been subjects of corruption accusations.
The smears came out of the blue, without warning. No one ever called to say, “Get ready for this, Hunter.” The first time I became aware of it was while browsing the Apple News feed on my iPhone.
I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. I watched a video in which Giuliani looked beyond unhinged. He appeared to be drunk but almost intentionally so, as if it were part of a choreography designed to better rile his boss’s appreciative base. His accusations and insinuations were so outlandish, so outside of any reality, that it actually struck me that he was doing a disservice to himself. I couldn’t see how any of it would become an issue, even after Trump started weighing in.
Breitbart and the rest of the right-wing crowd swiftly jumped on board and trotted out their familiar suite of distortions. They pounded me not only for my connection to Burisma but also for my work as a lobbyist and my first job out of law school, in Delaware. They questioned how I got fast-tracked in MBNA’s executive management program, failing to mention I was a Yale Law grad with my pick of opportunities.
Those attacks prompted more mainstream news outlets to run stories that countered the distortions with actual reporting. Yet in doing so, in the name of objective journalism, each story repeated the attacks made against me. It became a predictable cycle in a
