The tranquil atmosphere at Hunter Biden's trial, which has focused on his struggle with drug addiction, shifted Wednesday when his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Kestan, took the stand and portrayed Biden as a charming spendthrift who lived a lavish life of partying in New York.
Kestan, a dancer who Biden met at a gentlemen's club in 2018, sat with him in a quiet back room, played a song by the indie rock band Fleet Foxes to break the silence, and the two immediately hit it off, or as she put it, “there was an emotional connection.”
Her admission created one of the more awkward moments in a trial already rife with awkwardness: When lead prosecutor Leo Wise asked Hunter Biden to identify himself in court for the record, he waved awkwardly, smiled for a moment, then put his head in his hands and bowed his head.
Kestan's testimony was sympathetic to Biden, reaffirming the struggles of an addict struggling with family tragedy and the burden of living up to a famous family name. She repeatedly stated that she wanted to help Biden as he tried to quit in various ways, despite having seen him smoke crack on multiple occasions. Meanwhile, she was chipping tiny crystals off huge chunks of crack the size of ping-pong balls.
But it wasn't all doom and gloom: her testimony struck an upbeat and optimistic tone.
In a dramatic move by the prosecution, the special counsel investigating the president's son called Kestan minutes after brief and solemn testimony from Biden's ex-wife, Kathleen Buehl, who described her excruciating ordeal when she discovered Biden's cocaine addiction and her efforts to protect the couple's three daughters from his behavior.
Then Ms. Kestin arrived, and as a transfixed audience listened, she recounted a cinematic account of a drug-fueled party during Manhattan Fashion Week in 2018. Her testimony, like that of Mr. Biden's other lovers, is aimed at proving that Mr. Biden is a habitual drug abuser and that he lied when he claimed he was drug-free on his October 2018 application for a handgun.
She said the man withdrew a large amount of cash from a Wells Fargo ATM in Midtown Manhattan that week in February 2018, then had him read a code sent to his cell phone so she could withdraw the cash.
“He used the cash for a variety of things, but a lot of it was on drugs,” Kestan said.
But he also gave her $800 for another purpose, to “buy clothes for his children” at a high-end retailer.