Over the course of the roughly three decades of his working life, Robert Hunter Biden — the only living son of the current president of the United States — has landed one overpaid sinecure after another where his only discernible qualification involved the five letters in his surname.
Even though he’s only 52, this kind of patronage should entitle him to spend the rest of his days as a man of leisure. Unfortunately, Hunter’s idea of leisure tends to involve hoovering up white crystalline substances in five-star hotel suites with vacant-eyed Eastern European women, inter alia. Even golf tends to be less expensive — and we’re not even counting the not-infrequently destroyed laptops. (Look, Macs ain’t cheap.)
Say what you will about Hunter Biden’s Eastern European paid companionship, at least no procreation was involved. The same can’t be said for his relationship with Lunden Roberts, a woman he knew intimately — DNA tests have proven this — but who he claims not to remember. Unfortunately for Hunter, their amnesiac union ended with the presidential son siring a presidential granddaughter.
Hunter wants nothing to do with his latest daughter, Navy Joan — hardly a surprise, given the circumstances. Somewhat more surprising and shameless: According to the U.K. Daily Mail, Hunter is asking a judge to lower his child support payments because of a “substantial material change” to his income.
On Wednesday, the Daily Mail said it had obtained court documents in which Hunter’s legal team argued Roberts should receive less child support because of “financial circumstances, including but not limited to his income.”
The amount of Hunter’s child support payment is unknown; it remains under seal in Independence County, Arkansas. The order was set in 2020 and was adjusted four months later.
What we do know about the case, however, is that Hunter’s alleged penuriousness has been brought up more than once.
A brief timeline: Hunter impregnated Roberts during a Keith Richards-esque drug binge back in 2018, according to his memoir “Beautiful Things” — a misnomer so blatant it’s as if Nabokov scrapped the title “Lolita” and instead decided to market his transgressive novel under the moniker “Responsible Step-Parenting”
Hunter’s never seen his daughter Navy Joan, but at least he left her something to remember him by in the memoir, in which he describes his drug- and alcohol-fueled “rampages” that followed his divorce from Kathleen Buhle in 2017.
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“It’s why I would later challenge in court the woman from Arkansas who had a baby in 2018 and claimed the child was mine — I had no recollection of our encounter,” Hunter wrote. “That’s how little connection I had with anyone.”
Did it never cross Hunter’s mind that the child he fathered might one day ask, “Mommy, what was daddy like?” Did it never cross his mind that the question might stick in her mind — and that it would be answered, one day, by a poorly written tome which described her conception as a “rampage” in which her father insisted he didn’t even remember her mother?
I’m no expert in family law, but this alone seems to indicate that Hunter should be paying, oh, 200 percent of his salary in child support each month. Therein lies the problem here, however: Hunter’s been claiming he’s dead broke for a while now. Seriously.
“I am unemployed and have had no monthly income since May 2019,” he said in a November 2019 court filing. He also cited “significant debts.”
This was about the time Hunter had abandoned making money off of his name as a high-priced influence-peddler and was transitioning into the world of art. Apparently, he’s been doing very well in that field, however; last October, the New York Post reported he’d sold $375,000 worth of prints for his amateur doodlings. Not original artwork, mind you — prints, as in reproductions. No ethical issues there.
“The notion of a president’s son capitalizing on that relationship by selling art at obviously inflated prices and keeping the public in the dark about who’s funneling money to him has a shameful and grifty feel to it,” said Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethic under then-President Barack Obama.
“He can’t possibly think anyone is paying him based on the quality of the art. This smells like an attempt to cash in on a family connection to the White House.”
Originals, meanwhile, could go for half-a-million dollars.
It’s not as if he’s become unusually impoverished in the interim: “Hunter just moved out of a $20,000-per-month Malibu home where he lived with his wife Melissa Cohen and their two-year-old son Beau,” the Daily Mail reported.
“And before that, Hunter was living in a $25,000-per-month rented canal-front home in Venice, Los Angeles, with his 24-hour Secret Service protection.”
Painting “keeps me away from people and places where I shouldn’t be,” said Hunter Biden, well known for his foreign dealings and his battles with drug addiction https://t.co/4kWHygfyJd
— New York Times Arts (@nytimesarts) February 28, 2020
But, you know, he’s a starving artist. Those types tend to be penurious.
Cheer up, though, Lunden Roberts. Perhaps Burisma can chip in a few bucks.
