Hunter Biden Is on Trial, but All Eyes Are on the Biden Women

Naomi Biden Neal, Kathleen Buhle, Jill Biden and Hallie Biden attended Hunter Biden’s trial this week.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

One by one, the women drifted into the courthouse: The wife. The ex-wife. The daughter. The sister-in-law who, through the fog of tragedy and drug abuse, ended up an ex-girlfriend.

Once inside the courtroom, they locked their eyes past the many strangers who watched them — people who wondered if they would break down, or say the wrong thing. If they would cry.

Hunter Biden is the one on criminal trial, staring down gun charges. But the spectacle in the courtroom has forced the Biden women into an uncomfortable spotlight.

In the family, public life has often revolved around the men. The women called to testify had, at different points, tried to support and protect the one who was the troubled husband, father and son — and whose ruinous history of addiction continues to hit them with shrapnel. The women who didn’t speak sat in the courtroom, playing parts of nurturers and sentinels.

The pain of this responsibility was written on the face of Hunter Biden’s eldest daughter, Naomi Biden Neal, who testified on his behalf on Friday.

“He seemed great,” a nervous-sounding Ms. Biden Neal, dressed in black with her hair pulled back, told the court on Friday. “He seemed hopeful.”