A “deep descent” into substance addiction following the 2015 death of his brother, Beau Biden, led Hunter Biden‘s family staging an intervention for him in 2019. The Biden family gathered at father Joe Biden‘s home in Delaware in the run up to the 2020 presidential election. Hunter told CBS This Morning that he stormed out of the house, but his father and two daughters, Naomi and Maisy begged him to come back.
Hunter Biden tells @CBSThisMorning’s @AnthonyMasonCBS about the emotional experience of his family staging an intervention for his substance abuse: “I don’t know of a force more powerful than my family’s love — except addiction.” https://t.co/Iz24QzKDii pic.twitter.com/i0OX6E4bF6
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 2, 2021
Hunter revealed that his father chased him down the driveway as he tried to flee. Joe “grabbed me in a hug. He grabbed me, gave a bear hug, and he said –- and just cried and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Please,'” Hunter recalled. “I tried to go to my car. And my girls literally blocked the door to my car. Said, ‘Dad, Dad, please. You can’t. No, no.’ This was the hardest part of the book to write,” he said, referring to his upcoming memoir, Beautiful Things.
“I thought, ‘I need to figure out a way to tell him that I’m going to do something so that I can go take another hit.’ It’s the only thing I could think. Literally. That’s how powerful. I don’t know of a force more powerful than my family’s love. Except addiction,” Hunter told CBS’ Anthony Mason. Hunter elaborated in his memoir that he agreed to check into a rehab facility in Maryland to “end the scene.”
But that was a lie. Brother Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden, with whom he’d had a relationship, dropped him off at the facility. When she left, he called an Uber and checked into a hotel near the Baltimore airport. “For the next two days, while everybody who’d been at my parents’ house thought I was safe and sound at the center, I sat in my room and smoked the crack I’d tucked away in my traveling bag,” he wrote. “I then boarded a plane for California and ran and ran and ran. Until I met Melissa.”
Melissa is Melissa Cohen, Hunter’s now wife, with whom he shares one-year-old son named after his brother. He credits Melissa in the memoir for helping him to finally get sober. “She pushed away everyone in my life connected to drugs,” Hunter writes, adding that she took away his phone, computer, car keys, and wallet. She deleted every contact in his phone that wasn’t family, threw out his drugs and alcohol.
Melissa even had a doctor come to their Hollywood Hills apartment to help him go through withdrawal, Hunter revealed. He says he slept for three straight days, and when he woke up on the fourth day, asked Melissa to marry him. She accepted his proposal the next morning — seven days after they first met. They wed in May 2019.
Hunter Biden’s two-part interview airs April 4 at 9:00am ET on CBS Sunday Morning, and April 5 at 7:00am ET on CBS This Morning. Beautiful Things hits bookshelves on April 6.