President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden and other family members arrive at St. After the service, the family walked out toward the graves carrying two large wreaths.īeau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 at 46. Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic Church. Both women joined him on Sunday, as did Hunter and many of the president’s grandchildren among others at St. Biden’s raw openness around grief and his ability to empathize with fellow Americans who have experienced loss have become defining traits of his political career.īiden married Jill Jacobs in 1977 and they had a daughter, Ashley. But on the advice of other senators he stayed in office, commuting back and forth from Washington to Delaware. The tragedy almost prompted Biden, also age 30 when the accident happened, to give up his fledgling political career. The couple’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, who were just about to turn 4 and 3 at the time, were also in the car and were seriously injured. 18 of that year as they went out to buy a Christmas tree. (AP) - President Joe Biden and his family held a private memorial service Sunday to mark the 50th anniversary of the car crash that killed his first wife and their baby daughter.īiden, who had just been elected to the Senate in November 1972, was not in the car when his wife, 30-year-old Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were broadsided by a tractor-trailer on Dec. In the end, divorce allowed me to find my strength.WILMINGTON, Del. “Writing this book has been incredibly healing for me,” she said, “and my hope is it will be meaningful to those who have been through addiction or divorce, and especially to women who have felt like their entire identity was tied to their spouse. But what I also realized through those crushing experiences is that I needed to find a way to stand on my own.” Anyone who has seen addiction ruin a relationship, or been through infidelity and divorce, can tell you how devastating it feels. He remarried that same year, wedding Melissa Cohen, and they had a son in 2020, whom they named after Beau.īuhle told People previously, “When my marriage ended, I felt like I’d lost my sense of who I was. His breakup with Hallie was reported in 2019 (and he fathered a child with a woman he met at a strip club, Lunden Roberts, who gave birth in 2018). “It seems obvious now,” Biden added, “but then it was this unspoken, unacknowledged dynamic that had begun to impel us both: the idea that we could keep Beau alive by being together-that by loving each other we somehow could love him back into existence.” The affair began, he said, “as mutually desperate grasping for love we both had lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy.” Unlike in his ex-wife’s telling, he wrote that it was Buhle who found the text messages between him and Hallie. AP Stevenson claims that he and Jill first met Biden and his then-wife, Neilia, in 1972. In Beautiful Things, his own memoir published last year, Biden wrote about the end of their marriage too. Jill Biden’s ex-husband claimed that he was threatened by Joe Biden’s brother during his divorce. I told the girls that from this day forward, you will tell them the whole truth.” When Buhle asked how they knew, Finnegan said, “We found his phone,” and Naomi added, “There were text messages between them.” They had already called Biden to let him know that they had seen the texts, the therapist told Buhle, adding, “From now on, Kathleen, no more secrets. “Debbie looked me in the eye and calmly said, ‘Kathleen, Hunter’s having an affair with Hallie.’” “‘Debbie,’ Finny said once we had Naomi on speakerphone, ‘can you tell her? We can’t do it,’” she writes. In her upcoming book, If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing, out June 14, Kathleen Buhle describes how she found out that her then husband, the president’s son Hunter Biden, was having an affair with his late brother Beau’s widow, Hallie. Per an excerpt published by People, Buhle and Biden’s daughter Finnegan called Buhle to the home of the family’s therapist, Debbie, whom Buhle had enlisted to help her children process their uncle’s fight with brain cancer and their father’s drinking.

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