Hunter Biden’s first wife, Kathleen Buhle, stood by him through 24 up-and-down years of marriage, until 2017 — after the man she had met as a Jesuit volunteer in a Catholic church in Oregon in the early 1990s lied, cheated, drank and drugged his way out of her life.
Ms. Buhle, who is engaged in a long-running battle with Mr. Biden over unpaid alimony, is expected to testify as early as Wednesday about his all-consuming addiction to crack cocaine in the fall of 2018, when Mr. Biden checked “no” on a firearms application question asking if he was abusing drugs.
By then their marriage was already over. In 2015, two months after her husband’s brother, Beau Biden, died of cancer, Ms. Buhle asked Hunter Biden to move out of their house in Washington. His behavior had become erratic, and his affairs impossible to ignore.
Soon after, Mr. Biden entered a relationship with her sister-in-law, Hallie Biden, Beau Biden’s widow. The special counsel in the case, David C. Weiss, has also signaled he intends to call Ms. Biden.
After initial discussions over their divorce settlement were acrimonious, the two settled amicably, though Mr. Biden has paid only a fraction of the spousal support he had promised.
The two were already divorced at the time of the gun purchase, but Ms. Buhle shared custody of the couple’s three children and repeatedly expressed concerns about Mr. Biden’s behavior. She said she would search his car for drugs or paraphernalia to ensure that they were not exposed to the dark side of his life, according to her memoir.
In recent years, she has survived a bout with colon cancer, worked as an executive at a nonprofit organization in Washington and written about coping with close family members who are addicted to drugs and alcohol.