Hunter Biden Opens Up About The Affair That Had Everyone Talking

Everyone processes grief differently, and so it was with Hunter Biden and his brother's widow, Hallie. The pair ended up dating in 2017, two years after Hallie's husband Beau passed away — and while Hunter was still married to Kathleen Biden. Hunter first addressed his relationship with Hallie during a 2019 interview with The New Yorker, when he said he and Hallie had gone to the Hamptons, had begun texting each other after their return, and Hunter began watching TV at Hallie's house until late. "We were sharing a very specific grief. I started to think of Hallie as the only person in my life who understood my loss," he said then.

Today, Hunter admits: "I think people were confused by it. And I understand that. I mean, I really do. To me, it's not something that is difficult to explain. Because it came out of a real overwhelming grief that we both shared. And we were together, and trying to do the right thing," he said during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning.

Hunter reportedly talked then Vice President Biden, who is very much devoted to his family, into going public with his approval for the budding relationship. "'Dad,' I told him, 'if people find out, but they think you're not approving of this, it makes it seem wrong,'" Hunter reveals in his new book, Beautiful Things. But he also admits that he only spoke to the Vice President after the media had found out affair (via Fox News).

Hunter says his decision to ask for his father's blessing was undertaken because he wanted to protect all the Biden grandchildren. "The kids have to know there's nothing wrong with this, and the one person who can tell them that is you," Hunter wrote (via Fox News). But as he reveals in his book, the statement ended up exposing them both to public view. "I was madly trying to hold on to a slice of my brother, and I think Hallie was doing the same," he had written. To CBS News, Hunter says: " ... we were together, and trying to do the right thing. And that grief turned into a hope for a love that maybe could replace what we lost. And it didn't work. It didn't work."

Hallie was with Hunter long enough to get entangled in an incident over Hunter's gun. He says Hallie had thrown it away to try and make sure he didn't do anything to hurt himself. "I told her, 'You can't do that' when I realized that it was gone. And so she went back and they — the police came to help retrieve the gun, which was retrieved," Hunter says in a separate interview which ran on CBS This Morning. "Someone had gone through the trash and picked it up and they found it, within hours I believe. And so that was the end of the story."