Who is Kathleen Buhle? How long was she married to Hunter Biden?
The prosecution in Hunter Biden’s gun offense case called his ex-wife Kathleen Buhle as their second witness to ask her what she knew about his drug use.
The first of two criminal trials Hunter Biden is facing got underway this week in Delaware. Special counsel David Weiss charged President Joe Biden’s son with three felony counts in relation to the purchase of a firearm in October 2018 and alleges that he possessed the Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver while addicted to drugs.
Should he be found guilty, Hunter Biden could face a lengthy jail sentence. On Wednesday, the prosecution called to the stand Hunter’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, to give testimony about what she knew of his substance abuse.
Who is Kathleen Buhle? How long was she married to Hunter Biden?
Hunter and Buhle, who is originally from Chicago, met in the summer of 1992 while they were working in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Portland, Oregon. The two began a relationship shortly thereafter and she became pregnant with the couple’s first child, daughter Naomi, three months into the relationship.
They got married in July 1993 before Naomi was born later that year. Hunter and Buhle would go on to have two more daughters, Finnegan and Maisey, born in 2000 and 2001 respectively. From the time that they got married Buhle was a full-time mother and housewife according to court filings in the couple’s divorce proceedings in 2017.
She had asked her husband to leave their Washington DC house in July 2015, two months after his brother Beau Biden’s death from brain cancer, “due to his conduct the night before.” What that was referring to wasn’t elaborated in the court documents.
However, in her testimony in the gun trial she said that in July 2015 she found a pipe in an ashtray on the porch of their home. When she confronted him about it, he admitted that he had been smoking crack cocaine.
She had been concerned that he was using drugs since the year before when he was discharged from the US Navy Reserve on his first day after testing positive for cocaine.
Kathleen Buhle tells her story
In a book she published in 2022 titled ‘If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing’ she laid out her ex-husband’s long struggle with addiction. One of the stories she shared in her memoir was that just months after her divorce, she was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer, which she is now free of.
Being healthy and having no family history of colon cancer the diagnosis came as a shock. But it gave her perspective, telling Good Morning America that within minutes she thought, “I can’t believe I was that upset about divorce.”
In 2022, she also founded The House at 1229, a nonprofit social club for women, of which she is the CEO. It was created as a tribute to the women who supported her during what she called “the hardest part” of her life.