Hunter Biden’s trial unfolds in a city deeply tied to his family (2024)

“What’s the worst place for me to be trying to stay clean,” he wrote that afternoon in November 2018, according to a text that is now part of the court record. “Delaware.”

This week, Hunter Biden is back in Delaware, in a city that is inextricably linked to him and his family, for a federal trial that could send him to jail. The case is being heard in a federal courthouse named after J. Caleb Boggs, the senator his father defeated in 1972, launching a political career that would culminate in the presidency.

The trial is also taking place around the corner from Biden campaign headquarters, where hundreds of staffers are working on a reelection effort that could be affected by what occurs inside Courtroom 4A. Just blocks away sits the Amtrak station where Joe Biden, then a senator, commuted daily to Washington for decades, now called the Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Railroad Station. Nearby is the Brandywine Zoo, where Hunter Biden had his first job, shoveling llama manure and unclogging the drain of the otter pool, according to his memoir.

This week’s trial opens another chapter in the Bidens’ long history in Wilmington, one that could prove tumultuous even for a family familiar with trauma and public scrutiny. The case centers on a gun purchase that Hunter Biden made in October 2018, and a form on which prosecutors say he lied that he was not using illegal drugs or addicted to them.

But underlying the case is a relationship between a man, a family and a gritty American city. With a population of 72,000, Wilmington is hardly among the biggest U.S. cities, and it contains few famous landmarks. It is remote from the glamour of other presidential homes like John F. Kennedy’s in Hyannis Port, Mass. But with Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House, and his habit of returning to Wilmington most weekends, it has established its own plain-spoken role in presidential history.

And now Wilmington is wrapped up in the case enmeshing the president’s son — from Hunter’s decision to purchase a gun at StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply on Concord Pike, to the decision by his then-girlfriend to toss that gun in a trash can at Janssen’s Market on Kennett Pike, 3.8 miles away.

And prosecutors have said they may make their case with help from data from a laptop that Hunter Biden allegedly dropped off at a Mac repair shop in nearby Trolley Square.

As the trial opened here Monday, it was clear how strong the Biden ties are to the area. During jury selection, one man recounted that he’d known Beau, Hunter’s brother, and was a coach for his kids. Another recalled teaching at the same school as Jill Biden. A woman said she served Hunter Biden’s uncle at the bar where she worked (none of these prospects were picked for the jury). And in the courtroom, Hunter was greeted by familiar faces coming to support him.

“When it came to Beau and Hunter, they were close to me,” said Ricky “Mouse” Smith, who has known Joe Biden since they met as teenagers at a local swimming pool. “I’m here to basically say, ‘I support him.’ It’s wrong what they are doing to him.”

Hunter Biden has had mixed emotions about Wilmington — a place he described in his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” as “an overlooked, underappreciated microcosm of America” — and he has seemed throughout his life to alternate between being drawn to it and trying to flee from it.

He now lives 2,800 miles away in Los Angeles, on the country’s opposite coast, a place that is distant both culturally and geographically. But at the conclusion of his trial, a jury of his peers, selected from this city where he grew up, will be charged with evaluating the details of a case that is centered here.

“Growing up in Delaware doesn’t mean you’re automatically aware of what a microcosm it is. But when you grow up in Delaware the son of Joe Biden, you have no choice,” Hunter wrote in his memoir. “You not only learn how to get along with all kinds of people, you come to understand what motivates them, what they care about, and what they really need.”

He described his childhood as almost idyllic, with days spent riding BMX bikes on back roads, playing hockey on an ice pond and tossing acorns at cars with something of a code: “Never throw at a car driven by a woman or an elderly person. The highest-value target was a teenager in a van.”

Yet it is also here where his mother and baby sister were killed in a car accident in 1972, and where he and his brother Beau spent months recovering in the hospital as their dad was sworn into office for the first of six terms in the U.S. Senate. It is also here where Joe Biden has said the grief from that loss once drove him to consider jumping off a bridge.

Later, Wilmington launched Beau Biden to become Delaware’s attorney general, before he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Wilmington is where Beau’s funeral took place in 2015.

And Wilmington is where Hunter learned that drinking alcohol could drown out his insecurities and make him the life of the party.

“It made me feel complete, filling a hole I didn’t even realize was there — a feeling of loss and my sense of not being understood or fitting in,” he wrote of becoming intoxicated as a high school freshman.

By his senior year, by his own account, he was occasionally using cocaine. Just after graduation, he was caught and charged with cocaine possession; after a pretrial intervention and six months of probation, the arrest was expunged from his record.

As a young father and a new husband, Hunter Biden and his then-wife, Kathleen, moved between Wilmington and Washington before eventually raising their family in the nation’s capital, a period when he describes himself as a “functional alcoholic.” But the tragedies of the Bidens, and the memories of the people they have lost, have ensured that even when their lives and careers centered on Washington, Wilmington retained its powerful draw.

Each year on Dec. 18, the Bidens gather in Wilmington for 7 a.m. Mass at St. Joseph on the Brandywine, leaving a wreath with three white roses on the grave to mark the anniversary of the crash that killed Joe Biden’s first wife Neilia and his 1-year-old daughter Naomi. By 2015, Beau, who died at age 46, was resting nearby.

Also by then, Hunter was struggling with addiction, and his marriage was falling apart. Kathleen told him that she and their three daughters would not be spending the week with him, but would live in a separate home in Wilmington.

“I was shattered. I see now that what she was trying to do was to protect our girls,” Hunter wrote. “As much as it hurt me, I was the threat that she needed to protect them from. It’s a hard-earned wisdom — as an addict, you often force the ones closest to you to make the tough decisions.”

Kathleen, who is deeply familiar with Hunter Biden’s addiction, is among the witnesses the government has said it is prepared to call.

After Beau’s death, Hunter and Beau’s widow Hallie began a romantic relationship, and they decided to move to Annapolis, Md. “We wanted to get away from the fishbowl in Wilmington,” Hunter Biden wrote.

But ultimately that move felt to him like a failed effort to run away, he suggests.

“It was a bust right off the bat,” he wrote. “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.”

So they moved back to Wilmington, and on Oct. 12, 2018, Hunter Biden walked into StarQuest Shooters to buy the gun. He has written about his addiction issues around this time period, and federal prosecutors have indicated they plan to use his text messages to corroborate his writings.

“I was sleeping on a car smoking crack on 4th street and Rodney,” Hunter wrote to Hallie Biden two days after purchasing the gun, referring to a seedy intersection in the heart of Wilmington.

Several days later, she threw the gun into the trash can, setting off a chain of events that resulted in police uncovering it — and ultimately, to this week’s trial revolving around how Hunter bought it.

Several weeks after that purchase, Hunter Biden’s parents staged an intervention, according to his memoir. He was invited to dinner at their Wilmington house, only to find family members and counselors awaiting. He stormed out, his father chasing after him, his daughter screaming and taking the keys away from him.

Eventually Hunter agreed to enter a rehab facility in Maryland. But after Hallie dropped him off there, he immediately went to an airport hotel. He smoked crack for two days, he would later write. And then he boarded a flight for Los Angeles to try to start a new life.

His life has indeed stabilized in California, his friends and associates say — he has remarried, begun an art career and worked on staying clean and sober.

But this week, his past pulled him back to Wilmington.