Hunter Biden has been found guilty of illegal possession of a gun and lying about his drug use when it was bought. The verdict leaves the US president’s son facing a prison term.
He is the first child of a sitting US leader to be convicted of a federal crime, but he will be back in court in September to face tax charges in a separate trial.
It had looked far different last summer, when the 54-year-old looked set to resolve the trials and avoid prison time in a plea agreement with prosecutors.
But the deal unravelled in court, and the prosecutor leading the federal inquiry later went ahead with the gun charges.
In December, a second indictment alleged Hunter had failed to pay at least $1.4m (£1.1m) in federal taxes that he owed for tax years 2016-19.
Congressional Republicans have conducted impeachment hearings into President Biden to investigate alleged influence-peddling by his son. The months-long inquiry has not appeared to uncover any wrongdoing, however.
Meanwhile, Hunter’s personal struggles – from alcohol and drug abuse, to relationship strife – have spilled into full public view.
A childhood steeped in tragedy
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1970 to Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia, Hunter was given his mother’s maiden name as his first name.
He was only two years old in December 1972 when – less than six weeks after his father’s election to the US Senate – a truck rammed into the family car.
The accident took the lives of his mother and his baby sister Naomi, while leaving him with a fractured skull and his older brother Beau with a broken leg.
Joe Biden – who was not in the car – took his oath of office by their bedside in hospital.
Hunter later attended Georgetown University and Yale Law School, graduating in 1996.
Between the two degrees, he joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Catholic group that serves marginalised communities.
There, he met his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, a lawyer, and they wed in 1993. They have three children – Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy – but the pair split in 2017.
The ‘darkness’ of addiction
His father is teetotal, but Hunter started drinking as a teenager and has acknowledged abusing cocaine as a college student. He has been in and out of rehab.
In 2013, he signed up for the US Navy Reserve and was sworn in before his father – then the vice-president – in a White House ceremony.
According to the New Yorker, he drank excessively after the death of his older brother, Beau, from brain cancer in 2015, sometimes only leaving the house to buy vodka.
“He and Beau were one,” his daughter, Naomi, once wrote on Twitter. “One heart, one soul, one mind.”
During their acrimonious divorce, Ms Buhle accused Hunter of “spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he had sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills”.
Breaking her silence last year on how the 24-year marriage unravelled, she told Good Morning America: “He was struggling under a massive drug addiction, and that’s heart-breaking and painful and that wasn’t who I was married to.”
In his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, Hunter concedes that his infidelity was the final straw in their marriage.
A DNA test in 2019 found he was “the biological and legal father” of a child born to Lunden Alexis Roberts, an exotic dancer from Arkansas.
Hunter claimed to have “no recollection” of their encounter in his memoir, but he has settled a paternity suit with Ms Roberts and pays her child support.
None of the Bidens appear to have ever met Navy Roberts, now four years old. But amid a media pressure campaign, President Biden was last summer forced to acknowledge his seventh grandchild.
The gun
Before he finalised his split from Ms Buhle, Hunter entered into a relationship with his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden.
During a two-year relationship, the pair bonded over their shared and “very specific grief” as a result of Beau Biden’s death, he told the New Yorker.
Taking the stand at his Delaware trial, Hallie Biden testified that the president’s son had introduced her to crack cocaine and bought drugs in her presence. She also said his frequent use left him “agitated” and “high-strung”.
Two months after a stint in rehab in 2018, Hunter Biden purchased a handgun – what his defence team maintains was an impulse buy, under pressure from a pushy gun store owner.
Prosecutors said he lied on the firearm application form by claiming that he was not using drugs at the time. Hunter Biden’s attorneys argued he did not consider himself an addict and had been clean at that time.
Hallie Biden, who told the court she had confronted Hunter Biden over his drug use, found the weapon and ammunition as she again cleared “remnants of crack cocaine and [drug] paraphernalia” from his vehicle.
She described how, in a moment of panic, she stuffed the gun in a shopping bag and tossed it in a garbage bin, 11 days after the firearm was purchased.
“I didn’t want him to hurt himself or the kids to find it and hurt themselves” she said of her actions.
According to the New York Times, Hunter had ominously told a family friend at the time: “I know you all think the wrong brother died.”
Retrieving the discarded gun would ultimately involve local police, the FBI and an elderly man who had been fishing in the trash for aluminium and plastic.
Reports of an “amicable” split between Hallie and Hunter surfaced in 2019, less than a week after his father launched his third bid for president.
Mere weeks later, Hunter wed South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen after a whirlwind six-day romance. They have one son.
At his trial, Hunter Biden did not take the stand in his own defence but he and several family members sat through emotional testimony from three ex-partners, including Ms Buhle. His daughter, Naomi, also testified.
Speaking out in 2019 on his struggle with addiction, he said: “You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it.”
In Beautiful Things, Hunter Biden credits his survival to his family’s love, recounting an intervention that ended with his father tightly embracing him and saying: “I don’t know what else to do. I’m so scared. Tell me what to do.”
The president’s son has turned in recent years to painting as a form of therapy, telling the New York Times that it “keeps me away from people and places where I shouldn’t be”.
But sales of his artwork – for up to $500,000 a piece – have created an ethics dilemma for the Biden White House.
President Biden has defended his son on multiple occasions, including in a feisty presidential debate with Mr Trump in 2020.
