It drove me deeper into my hole, made me more certain there wasn’t a way back. I quit responding to the constant calls from Dad and my girls, picking up just often enough to let them know I was alive and seeking help, which in turn gave me cover to burrow back into oblivion.
It was around this time that Adam Entous, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the New Yorker magazine, emailed me an interview request for a story he was writing about Burisma and how my work there squared with Dad’s anticorruption actions in Ukraine. He said he simply wanted to get to the bottom of the allegations.
I had been obsessed with the magazine when I was younger and had other aspirations. I devoured every issue—the poetry, the fiction, all of it. I thought the pinnacle for a writer was to be published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, or Poetry magazine. It wasn’t snobbery. It was respect. That’s why I called Adam back, even though I didn’t know him personally. We soon began to talk by phone almost every night for the next several weeks.
What started out as conversations about my business dealings, which we covered extensively, soon turned into a personal tell-all. From Adam’s perspective, the story was an attempt to understand my role with a Ukrainian energy company. For me, it was an opportunity not only to give my side of that story but to shout to the world, “Here I am!”—an emphatic counterweight to “Where’s Hunter?” I decided I wasn’t going to hide who I was anymore. You want to know about my life? Here are the gory details.
Fuck it.
So I talked. And talked. Each night, wherever I happened to be staying, I propped my cell on a desk or table in front of me or positioned it on my chest while I lay in a hotel bed, set it to speaker, and answered any question Adam asked from his home office in Washington, where he would call from after helping put his kids to bed.
I didn’t tell him I was actively smoking crack at the time. Shortly after the interview sessions began, the noise from Giuliani died down for a bit and I moved to the Petit Ermitage, a discreet, ivy-cloaked boutique hotel tucked away on a quiet block between the raucousness of Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards in West Hollywood. I’d driven past it one day on my way somewhere else, was struck by its mysterious, half-hidden charm, and checked in.
I didn’t notify my dad or his campaign about the New Yorker story. I didn’t want input from the communications team. They were only weeks away from publicly announcing, via a video released on the morning of April 25, that Joe Biden was running for president in 2020—joining the battle, as my dad put it, for “the soul of the nation.” I knew damn well how they would react to my story, which would be published in early July, just after the primary’s first debate: they’d flip out and do everything they could to quash it.
I knew what the story would really do: inoculate everybody else from my personal failings. I wanted to make it so there couldn’t be anything held over my dad’s head. There would be no opposition press coming to the campaign saying, “We’re about to run a story on Hunter being a crack addict,” making everybody scramble to figure out what to do next.
I was taking that problem off the table. Besides, nobody was going to vote or not vote for my dad because his son is a crack addict. Hell, even Trump knew that.
I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew that our family was going to be attacked, and our lives turned upside down, no matter what. If political enemies didn’t come after me, they’d mug somebody else in the family. The only question my dad had to consider in deciding whether or not to run for president was the same one he dealt with in 2016: Is it worth it?
He knows everyone in our family believes it’s worth it. Nobody said to him, “Joe, please don’t do this; they’re going to murder me.” It’s not in our vocabulary, not how we size up any political landscape. He knew I was in the midst of a personal slide. Yet the confidence my father has in me is evidenced by the fact that he still ran.
What I didn’t count on when I agreed to talk for the New Yorker story, at least at first, was how cathartic the experience would be. The conversations became like nightly therapy sessions. I talked to Adam about Beau and Dad and how much they meant to me, about my personal and professional choices, about my alcoholism and drug addiction. I opened up about all of it with an honesty I hadn’t talked with to anyone else except a therapist, a fellow addict in recovery, or my family. I told him the truth about how I got to where I was.
Subconsciously, the process kept me tethered to the only constant sources of love since the day I was born: my brother and my dad. I didn’t realize it at the time, but explaining those relationships was the one thing that kept my eyes open wide enough to recognize salvation when it eventually presented itself: I honestly believe I would not have been capable of seeing Melissa for what she would become to me if I hadn’t explored my most meaningful relationships during those interviews. It was a little miracle.
The other twenty-two hours of my day, however, were spent doing every miserable thing I could to bury it all in a deluge of crack and booze. As personal as it was, what made coming clean to the New Yorker a relatively easy exercise was the fact that I thought I was
