Hunter Biden: addiction, the Navy and life after the pardon

Hunter was selected for a Navy Reserve commission in 2012 and assigned to a public-affairs unit in Norfolk in May 2013. A month later he tested positive for cocaine, and in February 2014 he was discharged. When the Wall Street Journal reported it in October 2014, he said: “It was the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge.” [1]

He has written and testified that he was addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine for years, most intensely from 2015, after Beau’s death, until 2019. In his 2024 deposition he described that period repeatedly to explain messages and payments he said he did not remember. The years of his heaviest addiction are also the years of the China deals, the laptop and the gun purchase. [2]

In July 2026 Judge Stephen Wilson awarded Hunter $1.7 million against the former Overstock chief Patrick Byrne, who had claimed Hunter offered Iranian officials to have his father “unfreeze” $8 billion in exchange for a bribe. The judge wrote that Byrne’s conduct in the case was “not a product of excusable neglect but rather of coordinated strategy.” [1][2]

After the January 2025 Palisades fire kept him from his Malibu house, Hunter and his South African wife Melissa Cohen spent long stretches in Cape Town. He told a local podcast he had “fallen madly in love” with the city and attacked Trump’s claims of a “white genocide” there. In August 2025 Melania Trump’s lawyer threatened a $1 billion suit over Hunter’s claim in an interview that Jeffrey Epstein had introduced her to Donald Trump. [3][4]

In September 2026 he helped launch a $LAPTOP memecoin, which he said was meant to “troll” the Trump family’s coins. It spiked to about $317 and collapsed within seconds as two market makers pulled out, one with about $686,000 and the other about $2.18 million ahead. Hunter published blockchain data showing the founders’ 300 million tokens had not moved. In October 2026 he called his father’s cancer treatment “like torture” and said he was staying sober. [5][6]