Chapter 27
Anthony and I worked well together, because when it came to logistics, we were both insane.
Campaigning, we often did seven stops in three days, determined to make the most of our time and reach the greatest number of people.
We figured out how to manage our trips down to the minute.
But we would look back on that week in June when, in addition to the rest, Hunter was on trial—for having misrepresented his drug use on a gun application and owning a gun while using illegal drugs—as the mad dash that almost broke us.
The day was hot and stormy, which made entering the cold, dark courthouse especially grim. The perspiration inside my dark purple pantsuit turned clammy against my skin as I made my way into the courtroom through a throng of press shouting and taking pictures.
Hunter knew I was coming, but beyond that, I’d told almost no one that I would be attending, so people seemed surprised when I showed up.
One side of the courtroom was filled with well-wishers.
When I reached those benches, I saw Hunter’s wife Melissa, Ashley, and many of Hunt’s friends.
There were a number of kind ministers from the community praying over us.
One took my hand and said, “Joy comes in the morning.”
Moments like those kept me going, as did some of the quotations I’d collected in my journals. I thought of a line from Abraham Verghese’s novel The Covenant of Water: “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”
On the other side was a wall of press staring at us, notebooks at the ready.
It could be hard to stay calm. Certain members of the press yelled questions like “How are you feeling, Jill?”
How do you think I feel? I wanted to say. My heart is broken.
That day, Ashley, Melissa, and I and everyone else in our group tried to take every break we could. We’d get sandwiches from Janssen’s Market and sit in the courtyard of the Quoin hotel to thaw out from the freezing courtroom.
As the selection began, I settled onto a hard bench and tried to see Hunter through the eyes of the jury—six men, six women, racially diverse.
The lawyers had bios on them and knew who had addiction in their family and what people’s feelings were about drugs.
But beyond that, it was hard to know how they would react.
Would they see him as a spoiled rich kid?
Would they feel empathy with him? Would they respect him for having been to hell and come out the other side, committed to his sobriety, with a stable life and a young child?
He went into dangerous neighborhoods, handed strangers thousands of dollars.
Sometimes those strangers returned with drugs; sometimes they didn’t.
The details were so salacious—all these drugs, all this money, all these women.
The lurid images of him with his shirt off, pipe hanging from his lips, the amount of risk he was taking—it was almost as if he were taunting death.
Would that make a mother on the jury more likely to feel protective and show him leniency or be horrified and make sure he was punished?
It was so beyond anyone’s normal life. How would the jurors make sense of it?
June 4
On the first day of testimony in Hunter’s trial, I sat behind him, in the front row between Ashley and Melissa.
The prosecutor said that Hunter had lied on a gun-purchase form and that no one was above the law.
Hunter’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said that Hunter misunderstood the form and was drinking but not actively using drugs at the time.
Sitting on the hard bench, I thought back on a conversation I’d had with Hunter when the news came out that he’d been charged.
“Why did you buy a gun?” I asked. I was flooded with questions: Why would he ever want a gun? Was he in some sort of danger? What was he thinking?
When I thought of guns, I thought of people I knew growing up in Pennsylvania.
My mother’s father, who owned a drugstore, was a duck hunter.
At dinner, we had to pick the buckshot out of our teeth when we ate.
My father had a gun in his nightstand in case of intruders.
The men in my family who served in the military knew their way around rifles.
But my main association with guns was a neighbor, a doctor, who built a duck blind by our man-made lake.
He would invite his doctor friends over.
They would get into fatigues, and they would hide behind their hay bales until a duck or a goose had the misfortune to come by, and then they would blast away.
It seemed so crazy to me. We lived in a neighborhood with a school.
Children lived around the lake, including the doctor’s!
But why would Hunter have a gun? In a city? It made no sense to me.
“I was getting a coffee,” Hunter told me when I asked him to explain what happened. “I looked out the window and I saw a gun shop. I decided to buy one.”
During the time after Joe and I learned that Hunter was battling addiction, we tried to become a refuge for the rest of the family, a neutral party.
Joe was the family cheerleader, the person calling everyone daily, checking in.
I was the navigator, negotiator, manager, truth-teller, trying to manage all the dynamics.
I wanted my grandchildren to know that I understood if they were struggling, and I wanted them to feel comfortable talking to me.
One complex family dynamic was Hunter’s relationship with his brother’s widow, Hallie.
She was with him through some of the most difficult years of his addiction, and she was called to testify at the trial.
I’d always known Hallie to be thoughtful and methodical, but apparently, when she’d seen the weapon, she’d panicked.
Rather than turning it in to authorities, she drove to Janssen’s and threw it in the trash inside a gift bag.
Then she went back later to retrieve it and it was gone. This was captured by CCTV footage.
By the time of the trial, Hunter had been sober for five years.
He had married Melissa Cohen, an American citizen from South Africa who he met in Los Angeles.
They quickly fell in love. She was extremely supportive of Hunter and helped him build a new life.
She saw in him the goodness and light that I knew he possessed.
Together they had a child they named Beau, who looked eerily like his namesake.
Hunter had written a successful memoir, Beautiful Things, which discussed his journey as an addict.
He also began creating gorgeous paintings that I hung in the residence and in my White House office.
So much had changed for Hunter. He’d committed to his sobriety and truly turned his life around.
He had a new wife and new baby, he’d reconnected with his daughters, and he’d found work making the world a better place, eventually becoming development director for a homelessness nonprofit in Los Angeles.
And yet I was taken right back to those chaotic days when the prosecution played a clip of Hunter reading his own audiobook.
I had read Hunter’s book when it came out.
It was painful to be made aware of the details of his life in those years, but I was also impressed with Hunter for being so honest, and for having gotten sober.
Still, hearing his voice read the part of the audiobook about his cross-country odyssey in 2017 was very emotional.
I had to work to hold it together. The life he described was so desperate.
Before that book, which came out two and a half months into Joe’s administration, few people in the family spoke about Hunter’s “addiction.” Everyone spoke about him not being well, or something being wrong with him, but it was never “Hunter’s an addict.
Hunter needs help.” It was the book that taught us how to stare the ugliness of addiction in the face, to name it, to do whatever we could to support his sobriety.
The prosecution played the audiobook clip, I supposed, to illustrate the depravity of Hunter’s existence leading up to the gun purchase in 2018, and to shock everyone with how many hundreds of thousands of dollars he’d spent on drugs.
In the section they shared, Hunter was on the road, strung out, and he got lost driving through the California desert. An owl flew overhead—he felt it was there to guide his car—and he followed the owl to where he needed to be.
Beau, I thought. Whether the owl was real or a hallucination, I believed that the spirit of Beau was at work in trying to help guide his brother to safety. Next to me, Ashley began sobbing. I put my arm around her and hugged her. As I did, I saw the press staring at us and taking notes.
They were looking for any emotion, any sign that the strain was getting to us as we squeezed together on the benches, freezing.
I concentrated on not showing any emotion at all, and I tried coaching Ashley and Melissa, who were on either side of me, to stay calm, too, but they didn’t always listen.
They were especially rattled by the presence of the person who’d published the contents of Hunter’s lost laptop, as well as Ashley’s therapy journal.
So I understood the impulse when Melissa lost her temper at the man who seemed hell-bent on tormenting our family. She screamed at him in the hallway, a moment that would wind up all over the news. I took her arm and I whispered, “Don’t give them that, Melissa.”
On a break, I headed toward the restroom to compose myself, but the different sides were being kept apart, so I had to wait to go that way down the hallway. I asked if it would be okay to duck into a stairwell to get a moment by myself.
“I just need a minute,” I said.