Zoe Kestan didn’t know who Hunter Biden was when he entered the strip club where she was performing in Manhattan seven years ago.
At the time, she was 24 years old, and she didn’t know that her client was the son of a former vice president and future president. The relationship that began that night would last 11 months.
Hunter Biden’s laptop featured intimate images of Kestan’s relationship with him, and she would testify at his federal gun trial in Wilmington, Delaware. He was found guilty on three felony charges in the case. Kestan chose not to comment on his recent pardon when speaking to The New York Times.
But she told the paper that she’s “still affected by this person, and certain people around me think of me only in relation to him.”
She has struggled to move on as Biden keeps appearing in the news, Kestan told the newspaper.
A few days after performing a private dance for Biden, she had understood who he was. She met him again at a suite at the Soho Grand Hotel where Biden began talking to her about her work as a designer.
“It boosted my confidence a lot,” Kestan said of her work at the strip club Vivid Cabaret. “It made me feel really powerful.”
At the time, Biden smoked crack cocaine every 20 minutes, she said, but he spoke of his determination to get sober once more. Kestan said he didn’t appear different when smoking, that he simply was himself.
Biden invited her to stay with him for the week.
“I’m just so attracted to him,” Kestan told the paper she thought at the time. “I did not want to leave.”
They began staying together at various luxury hotels in New York and Los Angeles, sometimes for long periods of time, sometimes short.
They went to art openings, fashion shows and dinners, where Biden was mostly unrecognized.
They stayed together for a month at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where Biden began introducing her as his girlfriend. They spoke about history, he gave her design ideas, and they posed for selfies together.
Kestan even introduced Biden to her mother.
“She didn’t say anything bad about him,” Kestan told The Times. “But she wasn’t particularly impressed.”
During their month together in Los Angeles, Kestan began to see the toll that the drugs were taking on Biden. At times, he asked her for money after saying that his money was also hers.
He disappeared for days at times, claiming to be checking into rehab, but taking out money far from where he said he was. Biden had trusted Kestan with his passwords.
Biden could also seem paranoid, blaming Kestan when he had lost his laptop, and claiming that she spoke badly of him to her friends.
Kestan saw him again in November 2018 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Biden had checked in to Ketamine rehab, but still asked if they could get powder cocaine to cook into crack, she told the Times. Kestan took Biden to Providence, where she used connections from college to get the drugs.
He dropped her off at the Amtrak station in the city the next morning, and that was the last time she saw him before facing him in court in Delaware in June.
They began firing off text messages.
“I wronged you,” Biden wrote at the time, she recounted. “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 wrote back.
After a while, communication stopped between them.
Kestan wrote to Biden again in the spring of 2019 to congratulate him after his daughter graduated high school. She sent another message asking if he was okay when he didn’t respond.
“Hi Zoe. I got married to the love of my life, and I’m happier than I have ever been,” Biden then wrote in an email to Kestan, she said. “I have begun a new life with my beautiful wife and ask you to please honor my privacy. Wish you well.”
“I don’t have regrets about anything I did online or with Hunter,” Kestan told The Times. “I don’t want to live that way.”
But she added: “It was only a year of my life, but it doesn’t feel like something that should have defined me for so long.”
