A chance meeting in December 2017 plunged Zoe Kestan, a downtown “it” girl and social media star, headlong into an unpredictable affair.
When Zoe Kestan first met Hunter Biden she didn’t know who he was. His father, Joe Biden, was no longer in office, and she didn’t read the news much anyway.
It would also force Kestan – as one of the most extensive observers of Biden’s drug use – to testify in federal court this spring, along with some of his other former romantic partners.Seven years after their meeting, Kestan, 31, is still trying to process what happened. She became well known, but on terms totally different from those she had imagined. The collision of her local fame with Biden’s national notoriety left her with whiplash, unsure of who she was.
Richardson hired Kestan to dance at his parties and had her photographed for his magazine. Kestan soon became a fixture in a dissolute 2010s milieu that included such figures as Julia Fox and Jack Donoghue – people who were not yet famous but on the cusp of it. That night they dined at Fanelli Cafe, and stayed up until 4am talking. Biden spoke of his children; his brother Beau, who died in 2015; and his addictions – to alcohol, and more recently, to crack cocaine. He looked back wistfully at his periods of sobriety and said he wanted to get sober again. He took a pull from his glass pipe, she said, every 20 minutes, but when he took it he didn’t seem impaired or different; he just seemed like himself.
The haven for immoderation was hardly a place to slow down. But the timing was perfect: Kestan needed to supervise the manufacturing of the WeedSlut line at factories in the area.Kestan remembers this stay as the highlight of their relationship. Biden introduced her around the hotel as his girlfriend and the pair explored the city together.
“I care so much for her safety, but she’s choosing this scary guy over her own future and goals,” he said.As the couple’s stay at the Chateau Marmont neared its end, Kestan had started to understand just how deeply Biden’s addiction ruled his life. When Kestan went to sleep, she said, Biden would retreat into the bathroom, where he would set up a laptop and a crack pipe on a chair and stay up all night making phone calls.
Kestan knew Biden wouldn’t change for her, but she was in love, and she kept travelling to see him: to Malibu, and finally, in November 2018, to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Biden was undergoing ketamine therapy to treat his addiction. When she arrived, it was obvious it hadn’t taken – he wanted to find powder cocaine he could cook into crack.
“Hi Zoe,” Biden wrote in an email. “I got married to the love of my life, and I’m happier than I have ever been. I have begun a new life with my beautiful wife and ask you to please honour my privacy. Wish you well.”In the months after Kestan stopped seeing Biden, she felt unmoored. She hadn’t danced since the relationship started, and when she tried working again at Vivid Cabaret, she lasted only two shifts.
The contents of the laptop also helped Kestan confirm suspicions she had throughout the relationship. Time stamps seemed to suggest that when Biden had told her he was checking into various rehabs, he was doing anything but. When a federal case charging Biden with illegally purchasing a firearm made its way to court this June, prosecutors called on Kestan to testify about their relationship. By the time she arrived at the Delaware courthouse, in a black blazer, Pucci scarf and oversize Celine sunglasses, Kestan was a player in a national drama.
Until the president pardoned his son on Sunday, reversing an earlier position that he would not do so, the younger Biden faced a maximum of 17 years in prison for the tax case, and 25 for the gun case, though he was unlikely to receive a sentence near that length. “It was only a year of my life, but it doesn’t feel like something that should have defined me for so long,” she said.
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