Jill Biden Wishes She Spoke More About Hunter's Addiction

Jill Biden says she's sorry she didn't talk more about her son Hunter's drug addiction during her time in the White House, explaining that she now realizes that being open about his substance abuse and his recovery can offer hope to others in the same situation. In a wide-ranging interview with The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg to promote her White House memoir View from the East Wing, the former first lady said Tuesday that addiction wasn't something she and her husband talked about.

"I think we were partly in denial," she acknowledged, per the AP, adding that she wondered why someone who had a family that loved him, a good education, and a lucrative career would turn to drugs. "It's hard for me to say this, but Hunter was a drug addict," she said.

She said Hunter's spiral into addiction was "a really hard time for our family to go through." Hunter Biden started abusing alcohol and drugs after his older brother, Beau Biden, died in 2015 of an aggressive form of brain cancer. Hunter has now been sober for several years, she said. "I'm sorry that I didn't talk about it a little bit more," she said on stage. "And I hope that by talking about it more as I go forward I hope that it offers other people hope," she said. "It is such a tough, tough thing to deal with." Hunter Biden wrote about his addiction to drugs and alcohol in a memoir of his own, published in 2021.