Perspective | Hunter Biden’s mother (2024)

It is, apparently, a complicated question for some people. Last week, I wrote a column that got a lot of reader feedback, and not in the way I’d expected. The column was about Hunter Biden’s trial, and in it I had briefly referred to Jill Biden as Hunter’s mother. She wasn’t, readers informed me; I had gotten it wrong.

The simplest reading is that those readers were correct. Jill Biden is not Hunter’s biological mother. His biological mom, Neilia, died in the same car accident that killed Hunter’s younger sister and seriously wounded Hunter and his brother, Beau, when Hunter was only 2. Jill began dating his father a few years after that and married him when Hunter was 7. Ergo, she is Hunter’s stepmother.

The thing is, I knew all of that when I referred to Jill Biden as Hunter’s mother. It wasn’t an unthinking error. It was a choice, based on other things I knew.

I knew, for example, when the investigation into Hunter’s gun purchase opened in 2022, Jill Biden told reporters, “I’m his mom,” and, “I love my son.”

I knew that in Joe Biden’s 2007 memoir, he recalled an incident in which a magazine fact-checker called him, confused. The fact-checker had asked young Beau and Hunter questions about their “stepmother,” but the boys had responded that they didn’t have a stepmother. “Neilia would always be Mommy,” Joe writes, “but Jill was Mom.”

She was the one, he wrote, who showed up at the boys’ school to volunteer at concession stands or the library, while Senate votes kept Joe in Washington late into the night. She was the one to cook for the boys, wash their clothes, drive them to sports practices, take them home.

I knew that when Hunter gave a deposition to Congress earlier this year, he talked about how, in the midst of his addiction, he’d made plans to rent an office space that could house the Biden Foundation: “It was a way that I was going to redeem myself, is that I was going to show everybody that I was okay, that I wasn’t out of my mind in the midst of addiction, and that what I was going to do is … get my mom this beautiful corner office that was there, and she would love it, and we’d all be okay.”

At the risk of pointing out the obvious: Jill Biden, in this telling, is not merely a woman bound to Hunter via the legality of his father’s marriage. She is the woman whose presence signified that the family was going to survive.

None of this mattered to some of the readers who emailed me, disagreeing with my use of “mother” even after I laid out the points above. Some of them were simply sticklers, concerned with factual accuracy. “Did Jill legally adopt him?” one man asked. Some of them seemed weighed down by their own experiences with their own blended families. But for others, the question was about something bigger than semantics. It was about the experiences that shape us and the wounds that never heal.

The death of Neilia Biden, they argued, was a catastrophic, formative experience for Hunter, a horrific origin story for the whole family. There may have been no drug addiction if Neilia hadn’t died; there may have been no trial. To refer to Jill as Hunter’s “mother” was to falsely imply that Hunter had grown up with a stability that he did not actually have. It was to deny him his rightful identity as a man who was broken by what he lost as a boy.

It’s a fair point, and it’s one that Hunter has wondered about, too. In 2021, he told CBS News that his battle with addiction came from a “feeling of never fitting in. It’s that hole,” he said, adding that “trauma is at the center of it.” The interviewer asked whether the trauma was the loss of Neilia, and Hunter replied: “Absolutely. And I don’t know why I had such a hard time ever admitting that.”

The U.S. Sun once reported on what it described as text messages Hunter sent in 2018, including angry missives that he had written about Jill. In one alleged text, to his uncle, he called her a “vindictive moron.” In another, to his brother’s widow, Hallie, he reportedly wrote, “F--- my step mother,” referring to Jill as “selfish” and “silly.”

Reading those alleged texts, you wonder which of these words would have hurt Jill the most. I can’t imagine it was “selfish” or “silly,” but I do wonder whether it was the only other word that started with an “s.”

The first lady’s office did not comment on the authenticity of the alleged texts when I reached out this week, but it’s worth noting that, if authentic, they were sent on the heels of Jill leading the family’s charge to get Hunter into rehab after another drug relapse. You could read them as a window into his true feelings about the woman who has been an integral part of his life for 49 years, who had cared for him as her own because she thought of him as her own. Or you could read them as the words of a man in the thralls of a monstrous disease, lashing out against anyone who was trying to intervene. “I lashed out at my mother for deceiving me,” Hunter wrote in his memoir.

Regardless of what Jill and Hunter went through at the time, I presume they came to understand what many of us have come to understand: We are often cruelest to the people we love the most. We are often at our worst in front of people we know will love us no matter how wretched we are. The relationship between parents and children can break a thousand times over, and it is the job of a parent to go searching for the pieces, searching for the glue.

“I consider her to be my mother as much as one can possibly imagine,” Hunter wrote, a few years after those text messages, in his memoir, “Beautiful Things.”

“We don’t say ‘step,’” Jill wrote in her own memoir, explaining that it bothered her when others presumed to define her family’s relationships for them. “Intended or not, when people displayed their unwillingness to let us set the terms of our own family, it felt like a judgment, a dividing line between what they counted as true family versus mere proximity.”

So. Was I incorrect in referring to Jill Biden as Hunter’s mother?

Here’s how I see it:

Hunter Biden had a mommy, who was his mother, and she did the things that mommies do for the children they unconditionally love. She was the one who had birthed him, fed him, changed his diapers, taught him to sleep through the night. Her last name, Hunter, became his own.

And when she died, another woman arrived to care for him, in the way that every mother wishes her children be cared for, should something awful happen that would make it impossible for her to do the job herself. This woman was the one to show up to Hunter’s trial, day after day. This woman was the one to cross oceans to get there, to ferry herself back and forth from France, or to leave behind her husband in Washington. She returned, day after day, to a courtroom in Wilmington to sit behind the man she had raised, who had said he loved her, who had called her names, who had been a source of agony and a source of joy.

When he left the courtroom on the final day, he reached for her hand.

Maybe Jill Biden isn’t Hunter’s mother. But if she’s not, then I don’t know the meaning of the word.