Hunter Biden: The struggles and scandals of the US president's son

When jury selection begins in Delaware on Monday he will become the first child of a US president to face a criminal trial.

Last summer, the 54-year-old looked set to resolve tax and gun charges against him and avoid prison time in a plea agreement with prosecutors.

But the deal unravelled in court, and the prosecutor leading the federal inquiry into his alleged wrongdoing later indicted Hunter on the gun charges.

In December, a second indictment alleged Mr Biden had failed to pay at least $1.4m (£1.1m) in federal taxes that he owed for tax years 2016-19.

Congressional Republicans have conducted impeachment hearings into the elder Biden to investigate alleged influence-peddling by his son. The Bidens deny wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Hunter's personal struggles - from alcohol and drug abuse, to relationship strife - have spilled over into full public view.

A childhood steeped in tragedy

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1970 to Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia, Hunter was given his mother's maiden name as his first name.

He was only two years old in December 1972 when - less than six weeks after his father's election to the US Senate - a truck rammed into the family car.

The accident took the lives of his mother and his baby sister Naomi, while leaving him with a fractured skull and his older brother Beau with a broken leg.

The elder Biden - who was not in the car - took his oath of office by their bedside in hospital.

Hunter later attended Georgetown University and Yale Law School, graduating in 1996.

Between the two degrees, he joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Catholic group that serves marginalised communities.

There, he met his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, a lawyer, and they wed in 1993. They have three children - Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy - but the pair split in 2017.

The 'darkness' of addiction

His father is teetotal, but Hunter started drinking as a teenager and has acknowledged abusing cocaine as a college student. He has been in and out of rehab.

In 2013, he signed up for the US Navy Reserves and was sworn in before his father - then the vice-president - in a White House ceremony.

But on his very first day at the naval base, he tested positive for cocaine use and was discharged, something he later said he was "embarrassed" by.

According to the New Yorker, he drank excessively after the death of his older brother, Beau, from brain cancer in 2015, sometimes only leaving the house to buy vodka.

"He and Beau were one," his daughter, Naomi, once wrote on Twitter. "One heart, one soul, one mind."

During their acrimonious divorce, Ms Buhle accused Hunter of "spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he had sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills".

Breaking her silence last year on how the 24-year marriage unravelled, she told Good Morning America: "He was struggling under a massive drug addiction, and that's heart-breaking and painful and that wasn't who I was married to."

In his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, Hunter concedes that his infidelity was the final straw in their marriage.

A DNA test in 2019 found he was "the biological and legal father" of a child born to Lunden Alexis Roberts, an exotic dancer from Arkansas.

Hunter claimed to have "no recollection" of their encounter in his memoir, but he has settled a paternity suit with Ms Roberts and pays her child support.

None of the Bidens appear to have ever met Navy Roberts, now four years old. But amid a media pressure campaign, President Biden was last summer forced to acknowledge his seventh grandchild.

Biden acknowledges seventh grandchild for first time

Even before his split from Ms Buhle was finalised, Hunter entered into a relationship with his brother's widow, Hallie Biden.

For about two years, they bonded over the shared and "very specific grief" of their loss, he told the New Yorker.

Two months after completing a stint in rehab in 2018, Hunter purchased a handgun on a whim. According to the New York Times, he ominously told a family friend: "I know you all think the wrong brother died."

Prosecutors say he lied on the firearm application form by claiming that he was not using drugs at the time - an offence for which he could now face up to 25 years behind bars.

Hallie found the weapon in his vehicle and, fearing he might hurt himself, tossed it in a bin behind a grocery store 11 days after he bought the firearm.

By Hunter's own admission - published in his memoir - he was in the throes of a "full-blown addiction" at the time.

Reports of an "amicable" split between the two surfaced in 2019, less than a week after his father launched a third bid for president.

But mere weeks later, Hunter wed South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen after a whirlwind six-day romance. They have one son.

Speaking out in 2019 on his struggle with addiction, he said: "You don't get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it."

Hunter, with father Joe and brother Beau, waves at supporters during Barack Obama's inauguration as president

In Beautiful Things, he credits his survival to his family's love, recounting an intervention that ended with his father tightly embracing him and saying: "I don't know what else to do. I'm so scared. Tell me what to do."

Hunter has turned in recent years to painting as a form of therapy, telling the New York Times that it "keeps me away from people and places where I shouldn't be".

But sales of his artwork - for up to $500,000 a piece - have created an ethics dilemma for the Biden White House.

President Biden has defended his son on multiple occasions, most notably during a presidential debate in 2020.

After Mr Trump took issue with his child's struggles, Mr Biden responded: "My son - like a lot of people - had a drug problem. He's fixed it and worked on it, and I'm proud of my son."

After graduating from Yale, Hunter worked at MBNA America, a bank holding company headquartered in Delaware and later acquired by Bank of America.

Joe Biden's close ties to the bank - one of the largest employers in Delaware and a top contributor to his political campaigns - earned him the unfavourable moniker of "the senator from MBNA".

As Hunter was promoted to the rank of executive vice-president, Joe pushed bankruptcy reform legislation favourable to MBNA through the Senate.

In the early 2000s, while still receiving consulting fees from the bank, Hunter opened a Washington lobbying practice.

It saw him land "clients with interests that overlapped with [his father's] committee assignments and legislative priorities", according to Politico Magazine.

The father-son relationship at the time, he told the New Yorker, was that neither would speak to the other about lobbying work.

President Biden has maintained this to be true in the case of more recent allegations of wrongdoing as well.

In 2006, with then-Senator Biden set to re-assume chairmanship of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, Hunter and another relative made an ill-fated purchase of a hedge fund group.

Their tenure at Paradigm Global Advisors extended through Joe Biden's 2008 run for president and selection as vice-president to President Barack Obama.

During this time, the fund was connected with several alleged fraudsters, including a Texas financier convicted of running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in US history.

The Bidens denied any wrongdoing and faced no charges. In 2010, they liquidated the fund and returned money to investors.

China and Ukraine

Much has been made in recent years about Hunter's foreign business interests while his father was vice-president.

In 2013, he took a founding board seat at BHR, a Chinese private equity firm - first as an unpaid member and later owning a 10% equity stake in the fund.

The company was registered in Shanghai less than a fortnight after Hunter flew with his father on an official vice-presidential trip to China and met BHR's chief executive, but only for "a cup of coffee", the first son later said.

After his father left office in 2017, Hunter partnered with Chinese oil tycoon Ye Jianming on a natural gas project in Louisiana.

The deal collapsed after Ye was detained by Chinese authorities on corruption charges and subsequently went missing.

Hunter's dealings in Ukraine have stoked even more controversy, given that his father was the Obama administration's point man for US-Ukraine relations.

In 2014, he joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, where he was paid as much as $1.2m (£943,000) per year.

As part of an anti-corruption drive, Vice-President Biden was at the time rallying for the ouster of the country's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.

Mr Shokin was removed by parliament in 2016, but critics argue the prosecutor only lost his job because he was investigating Burisma.

Republicans alleged both Joe and Hunter Biden had received $5m payouts from Burisma executives in exchange for Mr Shokin's firing.

But those claims fizzled when an ex-FBI informant was charged with fabricating the bribery scheme.

A former business partner to Hunter also testified Joe had been on speakerphone several times during Hunter's calls with various contacts.

Allegations of corruption formed the centrepiece of both President Trump's first impeachment in 2019, and are stoking the nascent impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

A laptop abandoned by Hunter at a Delaware repair shop, and the seedy contents of its hard drive, also featured prominently in the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Biden team argued at the time it was a "smear campaign" engineered by Russian disinformation, but the hard drive has been authenticated by US media and the FBI has it.

Analysis of its contents has provided proof of Hunter's extensive earnings from his work in China and Ukraine, as well as evidence of his alcohol- and drug-fuelled escapades.

As the president revs up his re-election campaign, the extensive fallout from his son's legal drama, business interests and tabloid-friendly life is proving to be an unwelcome distraction.

-bbc