New York: When Zoe Kestan first met Hunter Biden she didn’t know who he was. His father, Joe Biden, was no longer in office, and she didn’t read the news much anyway.

As far as Kestan knew, as she neared the end of her shift at Vivid Cabaret, the midtown Manhattan strip club where she performed, Hunter Biden was just another VIP client with the clout to book a private room in the wee hours of the morning.

And Kestan, at the time a 24-year-old downtown “it” girl, fashion designer and social media star, could have had no idea, as she rode the elevator to the top floor of the club, that the evening would change her life – plunging her into an 11-month love affair with a man whose personal conduct would become the subject of the country’s prurient curiosity.

Her relationship with the handsome, well-dressed customer would end with intimate images of Kestan exposed to the world, via Biden’s infamous laptop, and turn her into a tabloid figure in her own right, dragged into the chummed waters of a partisan-media feeding frenzy.

It would also force Kestan – as one of the most extensive observers of Biden’s drug use – to testify in federal court this spring, along with some of his other former romantic partners.

Seven years after their meeting, Kestan, 31, is still trying to process what happened. She became well known, but on terms totally different from those she had imagined. The collision of her local fame with Biden’s national notoriety left her with whiplash, unsure of who she was.

“I was confronted with the fact that the only thing I know about my identity now is – I’m still affected by this person, and certain people around me think of me only in relation to him,” Kestan said in an interview from her apartment in New York’s Brooklyn borough, where she lives with her shih tzu, Enzo.

Biden’s regular appearances in the news, she said, have made it hard for her to move on, personally and professionally. On Sunday, the president announced that he would pardon his son, who was scheduled to be sentenced this month on federal gun and tax evasion charges.

Neither Hunter Biden nor his lawyers responded to requests for comment.

While Kestan did not want to address her ex’s high-profile reprieve, she had much to say about her year with Biden, and its difficult aftermath. There’s no doubt she has lived through something sensational and extraordinary, but she can’t quite figure out how it fits in with the rest of her life.

Inventing ‘WeedSlut’

A New Yorker through and through, Kestan, the daughter of a lawyer and a salesperson, grew up in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side, in the Manhattan borough. She attended the elite Horace Mann School, and a lifelong love of fashion and art led her to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she nurtured plans to turn her designs into a brand. Kestan returned to the city after graduation, by day working for Jeff Koons as a colour mixer and by night immersing herself in Manhattan nightlife. A regular at the Boom Boom Room and China Chalet, she found herself mixing with other designers and picking up freelance projects for Telfar Clemens and rapper Travis Scott.

She became a star in the downtown world through her Instagram, which combined images of Kestan in scant dress (often consuming marijuana) with a rainbow-coloured mood board of objects that caught her eye: a Lego house, some patterned yarn, an orange cream soda.

Kestan had long been a reader of Vice magazine, which spurred her fascination with porn stars including Sasha Grey and Stoya, who she thought embodied a kind of intelligent feminist sexuality.

“Slutty was an art form for her,” said Matheus Lima, a longtime friend of Kestan.

It was through her Instagram that Kestan was discovered by Andrew Richardson, publisher of a namesake magazine and streetwear label pitched at the intersection of erotica, skate culture and the art world.

Richardson hired Kestan to dance at his parties and had her photographed for his magazine. Kestan soon became a fixture in a dissolute 2010s milieu that included such figures as Julia Fox and Jack Donoghue – people who were not yet famous but on the cusp of it.

In 2015, she lost her Koons job but soon picked up another as a designer at ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. Still, she was looking to supplement her income. After some encouragement from a friend who was a stripper, Kestan began dancing at Vivid Cabaret.

“It boosted my confidence a lot,” she said. “It made me feel really powerful.”

In the spring of 2017, Kestan folded all her nightlife connections and fascinations with the aesthetics of sex work and weed into a collection of lingerie and apparel that she showed at Paul’s Baby Grand, a cocktail lounge in Tribeca.

“WEEDSLUT,” read a flyer defining her new brand, “is about embracing and enjoying the effort and glamour of an exaggerated style of dress that is unashamedly dripping with sexuality.”

Kestan felt the show was a triumph, and started visiting manufacturers.

“She had a lot of ideas and energy, and she was hardworking,” Richardson said. “After the show at Paul’s Baby Grand, we all thought she was going to go on and do something.”

Later that year, she met Biden.

‘I’m just so attracted to him’

A few days after their private dance, Kestan walked into a suite at the Soho Grand Hotel and found Biden in his underwear smoking cigarettes and blasting music by country singer Sturgill Simpson. By then, she had figured out who he was, and when another dancer invited her to a party with Biden at the downtown hotel, Kestan figured: Why not? Her brand was debauchery and camp, and she was young.

In the hotel room, Biden immediately asked Kestan about her work. He wanted to see photos of her designs, to connect on a creative level.

It was disarming, Kestan remembered. Biden was 47, nearly twice her age, but he wanted to talk to her as a peer. And he was exciting and spontaneous. When Kestan mentioned that she wanted to check out some new designs at a nearby lingerie shop, Biden handed Kestan the keys to his Porsche to drive the seven blocks from the hotel. Then, she said, he persuaded the staff to let them stay past closing so they could browse.

That night they dined at Fanelli Cafe, and stayed up until 4am talking. Biden spoke of his children; his brother Beau, who died in 2015; and his addictions – to alcohol, and more recently, to crack cocaine. He looked back wistfully at his periods of sobriety and said he wanted to get sober again. He took a pull from his glass pipe, she said, every 20 minutes, but when he took it he didn’t seem impaired or different; he just seemed like himself.

In the morning, Biden asked Kestan to stay the week with him. She knew this was fast, but she felt a powerful connection between them.

“I’m just so attracted to him,” Kestan said, recalling her thinking. “I did not want to leave.”

Thus began the pattern of their relationship: stays, some long and some short, at luxury hotels in New York and Los Angeles – the Four Seasons, the Mercer, 6 Columbus, the Roosevelt, the Freehand, the Jeremy. In New York, Kestan introduced Biden to her downtown demimonde, taking him to art openings and fashion shows and out to dinner at Lucien. Not yet a national figure, Biden largely went unrecognised.

The pair had discussed a stint in rehab for Biden and agreed to go together to California for him to get sober. But when Kestan arrived in Los Angeles, Biden had changed plans, renting a bungalow for a month at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip.

The haven for immoderation was hardly a place to slow down. But the timing was perfect: Kestan needed to supervise the manufacturing of the WeedSlut line at factories in the area.

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Kestan remembers this stay as the highlight of their relationship. Biden introduced her around the hotel as his girlfriend and the pair explored the city together. She found Biden funny, smart and charming: a history buff who wanted to talk about Genghis Khan and Cleopatra; an artist at heart who wanted to write a great book, gave her ideas for WeedSlut merchandise and listened to her read Camille Paglia essays late into the night; and an exhibitionist who loved posing for selfies as much as she did, and mused about posting explicit videos of himself to Pornhub.

And he was touchingly sensitive, she said. Up late one night, taking mushrooms and listening to their favourite music, Biden had a surprising reaction to a song by the rapper Lil Peep that Kestan had put on. The artist had died recently of an overdose, and hearing his songs made Biden sad. He asked her to turn it off.

Another night, Kestan introduced Biden to her mother over dinner at the Chateau. Her mother was skeptical.

“She didn’t say anything bad about him,” Kestan said. “But she wasn’t particularly impressed.”

It wasn’t just her mother. A month earlier, Kestan had invited Lima to a Manhattan hotel suite to meet Biden. At first, Lima was charmed: Biden was easy to talk to and gave him a gold ring.

“But then very quickly, I was like, this has a price,” Lima said. “You don’t just get things for free.” Lima expressed his concerns to Kestan; in particular, he was worried that Biden’s lifestyle could be a danger to her. When Kestan continued to see Biden, Lima was distraught.

“I care so much for her safety, but she’s choosing this scary guy over her own future and goals,” he said.

Party’s over

As the couple’s stay at the Chateau Marmont neared its end, Kestan had started to understand just how deeply Biden’s addiction ruled his life. When Kestan went to sleep, she said, Biden would retreat into the bathroom, where he would set up a laptop and a crack pipe on a chair and stay up all night making phone calls. If no one answered, he would find cam girls on the internet to keep him company.

At other times, Kestan said, Biden would go on late-night drives around Los Angeles, sometimes bringing strangers back to the hotel to party. Or he would join her poolside in the morning after a night out, collapsing onto a chaise longue with a double vodka.

He had also turned her into a kind of personal assistant, sending her out to get money from the ATM to pay dealers. He told her his money was her money, but sometimes he asked Kestan to spot him.

One morning she woke up and Biden was gone. When she called him, he said he had rented another bungalow in the hotel to party with some people he had just met. Later, he disappeared for days, claiming he was checking into rehab. But Kestan, whom Biden had trusted with his passwords, saw that he was taking money out of the bank far from where he said he was.

At other times, Biden seemed paranoid, blaming Kestan when he misplaced his laptop, and accusing her of speaking ill of him to her friends.

Kestan knew Biden wouldn’t change for her, but she was in love, and she kept travelling to see him: to Malibu, and finally, in November 2018, to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Biden was undergoing ketamine therapy to treat his addiction. When she arrived, it was obvious it hadn’t taken – he wanted to find powder cocaine he could cook into crack.

Kestan drove him to Providence, Rhode Island, where she still had college connections who could sell it to them. In a hotel there, the two discussed English cultural theorist Mark Fisher and listened to Red Scare, an edgy cultural commentary podcast that would later have Kestan on as a guest.

The next morning, he dropped her off at a Providence train station. It was the last time she would see him in person until she saw him in court this June.

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After they parted at the station, the pair began to fight bitterly over text, with Biden by turns lashing out and self-flagellating.

“I wronged you,” Biden wrote in a WhatsApp message. “I intentionally hurt you. I am a bad man. You need to be away from me forever.”

“Know how much I am grieving the beauty that was our relationship,” Kestan responded.

Frequent texts became infrequent emails, and then communication mostly stopped.

In the spring of 2019, Kestan reached out to Biden to congratulate him on his daughter’s high school graduation, which she had seen on Instagram. When she didn’t hear back, she sent him another message to make sure he was OK. Shortly after, Biden wrote to her for the last time.

“Hi Zoe,” Biden wrote in an email. “I got married to the love of my life, and I’m happier than I have ever been. I have begun a new life with my beautiful wife and ask you to please honour my privacy. Wish you well.”

The laptop

In the months after Kestan stopped seeing Biden, she felt unmoored. She hadn’t danced since the relationship started, and when she tried working again at Vivid Cabaret, she lasted only two shifts.

Meanwhile, the WeedSlut collection was ready, but Kestan couldn’t find the energy to market it. The brand she had spent years building didn’t seem right anymore. It had nothing to do with Biden, and yet she felt it was linked to him. When Instagram took down her account for violating community guidelines, she didn’t try to get it reinstated.

“I started not liking it anymore,” she said. “I was embarrassed by it.”

In October 2020, the New York Post reported that emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden contained incriminating evidence against him and his father, at the time the Democratic presidential nominee. The paper’s claims about wrongdoing on the elder Biden’s part were not substantiated, but as the story took off, the laptop – which contained thousands of images, videos and text messages from a time period that coincided with Kestan and Biden’s relationship – became a media sensation.

As explicit images from the laptop spread on social media, Kestan had two reactions. One was concern for her family: Anonymous accounts on Reddit and 4chan, for instance, had posted personal details about her parents and friends.

The other was a strange sense of validation.

“Now there’s physical evidence that we spent that time together,” Kestan said.

The contents of the laptop also helped Kestan confirm suspicions she had throughout the relationship. Time stamps seemed to suggest that when Biden had told her he was checking into various rehabs, he was doing anything but.

And through news reports, Kestan learned that Biden had fathered a child with an Arkansas woman while Kestan and Biden were together. Biden had told Kestan she was the only person he had slept with since getting together with his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden.

But if these revelations made Kestan more ready to move on, national events wouldn’t let her. Biden’s laptop became the focus of investigations into his taxes and his purchase of a handgun, and Republicans in Congress had a field day with evidence of his tawdry life.

In July 2023, during a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee about the IRS investigation into Biden’s taxes, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene held up a poster board covered in sexually explicit images of Biden, including one with Kestan, which made Kestan feel, as she put it, “gross and angry.”

Fox News posted a video segment about Greene’s stunt on its website with a headline identifying Kestan as a “prostitute”, a job she has never had. Other publications identified her as Biden’s “stripper ex”.

When a federal case charging Biden with illegally purchasing a firearm made its way to court this June, prosecutors called on Kestan to testify about their relationship. By the time she arrived at the Delaware courthouse, in a black blazer, Pucci scarf and oversize Celine sunglasses, Kestan was a player in a national drama. And Biden, who could once walk into a store without being disturbed, was now a celebrity, pilloried by the right as an embodiment of Democratic rot, pitied by many for his addiction and celebrated by sections of the internet as a kind of ironic loser-hero.

In court, when Kestan identified Biden for the record, her famous ex – now sober and married – waved at her, and smiled.

Her sweeping, colourful testimony included a detail about Biden’s fondness for the indie band Fleet Foxes that spread widely online. It was also a rigorous chronology of Biden’s drug use in her presence, which prosecutors used to establish that he had been addicted to crack when he applied for the gun and had lied about it on the application.

Under oath, Kestan discussed his crack pipes and smoking schedule, the parade of dealers, the succession of hotels, his increasingly erratic behaviour, the failed attempts at rehab.

This was one reason she sometimes cut her trips to see him short: because, she testified, she couldn’t handle seeing him in person not trying to get sober.

“I thought that if I left,” she said during her testimony, “he finally would.”

Moving on

Days after Kestan testified, Biden was found guilty of three felony charges related to the handgun purchase. Then, on September 5, Biden pleaded guilty to nine charges in a federal tax case against him.

Until the president pardoned his son on Sunday, reversing an earlier position that he would not do so, the younger Biden faced a maximum of 17 years in prison for the tax case, and 25 for the gun case, though he was unlikely to receive a sentence near that length.

Kestan did not comment on the pardon, but said Biden’s plea was a relief. It spared her yet another testimony and closed a surreal and sometimes painful chapter she hopes to move past.

“I don’t have regrets about anything I did online or with Hunter,” she said. “I don’t want to live that way.”

At the same time, Kestan said, the relationship has cast a shadow over her in ways she didn’t expect. She hasn’t had a serious relationship since Biden, and she can’t help wondering whether a succession of promising job interviews that did not turn into job offers has something to do with what happens when you search her name on Google.

“It was only a year of my life, but it doesn’t feel like something that should have defined me for so long,” she said.

After several years in the creative wilderness, Kestan has started a new home décor line and has been working as design director for decorative artist and designer Elizabeth Hayt.

And she’s stepping out again.

Last month, Kestan attended an opening at Lomex, an au courant Tribeca gallery, for Kye Christensen-Knowles, whom she met when they were college freshmen at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Christensen-Knowles had included in his show a portrait of Kestan, along with ones portraying other members of the painter’s milieu, like cult writer Dennis Cooper and art dealer Begum Yasar.

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Wearing pink Pucci tights and a nylon bodysuit, Kestan mingled with the fashionable crowd, some of whom had known her for many years. Like Kestan, they weren’t totally sure what to make of her relationship with Biden.

Alexander Shulan, who owns the gallery and is friendly with Kestan, called the relationship “confusing and strange”, an uncanny example of the intermixing of cultural spheres.

Christensen-Knowles described it as a challenge that Kestan was capable of overcoming. “This is an albatross that is necessary for her to confront so she can grow,” he said.

He had painted Kestan in a pink skirt suit, heels and a pearl bracelet – as a Jackie Kennedy-esque political spouse. Her gaze is cast down, and her hair is gathered into disquieting tendrils.

“She has an aura that has always struck me, an old-world grace and dignity to her beauty,” Christensen-Knowles said. “I was hoping to capture her how I see her: as a dignified subject with inherent power.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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