Wilmington: Kathleen Buhle told a Delaware jury that she learnt her ex-husband was using drugs the day after their 22nd wedding anniversary in 2015.

She’d already known he struggled with alcohol, and then that night, she said, she found a crack pipe on an ashtray on their porch in Washington.

Zoe Kestan told the jury that she realised her former boyfriend used drugs the very first night they met in 2017. While working at a gentleman’s club in New York, she was sent to give a private dance to a client. The client seemed kind and “charming”. Within 10 minutes, she said, he was smoking something on the balcony.

Hallie Biden might have known of her former partner’s demons even before the two became romantically involved. The man was her late husband’s brother, after all, and his substance issues hadn’t been a secret within the family. But as they fell in love, they fell apart. He was using drugs, she testified. She started using drugs, too.

In October 2018, Hallie found a gun in his car. Panicked, she tossed it in a rubbish bin at a grocery store, and that act is what ultimately led to the investigation that resulted in the trial that brought all three women to a courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware, to talk about this man, this addict in their lives: Hunter Biden, the son of now US President Joe Biden.

Buhle, Kestan and Hallie Biden had each been called by the prosecution to bolster the government’s legal argument: that Hunter had lied when he had purchased a revolver from a Wilmington firearms shop. That he had said he wasn’t a drug addict when, in fact, he was (his defence argues that he was not using drugs at the time of the gun purchase).

But in the course of the trial, the women of Hunter Biden’s life ended up testifying to an experience outside the boundaries of the law and beyond the boundaries of class or profession: what it feels like to cling to someone who is hellbent on his own destruction. What it means to care for someone who, as Hunter once wrote in a text message to Hallie, “ruined every relationship I’ve ever cherished”.

After Buhle found the crack pipe – she hadn’t known what it was at first, and Hunter Biden had to tell her – the life she had known began to disintegrate. She started searching his car for drugs, terrified their teenagers would stumble across them when they borrowed the car. She said she found drugs about a dozen times.

In her 2022 memoir, she describes one incident: opening a designer canvas bag to see white crystalline powder and an assortment of copper wire, tweezers, a lighter and a pocketknife. She tossed the whole bag in her bag, and then later tossed the whole thing in a public rubbish bin. It was the first, but not the last, example of a woman Biden loved trying to save him from himself by throwing out what she feared could harm him.