Hunter Biden’s Former Partners Describe Toll of His Drug Abuse

Two of Hunter Biden’s former romantic partners, his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, provided vivid and gut-wrenching testimony on Wednesday about his out-of-control addiction to crack in the weeks and months before he claimed to be drug-free on a federal firearms form.

Relaying their divergent experiences with President Biden’s son, the two women — Kathleen Buhle, his wife of 24 years, and Zoe Kestan, whom he met in 2017 — painted a composite portrait. They depicted a family man who was both falling into an abyss of addiction and living a lavish, party-hopping high life in New York and Los Angeles.

A third woman in Mr. Biden’s life, Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau, could be called as a witness for the prosecution as early as Thursday, the fourth day of Mr. Biden’s trial on charges he lied on an application to obtain a gun in October 2018.

Of the three, she was closest to Mr. Biden when he bought the gun, and is likely to offer the most complete accounting of actions laid out in his indictment over whether he had lied on a federal gun application.

David C. Weiss, the special counsel who has also brought more serious tax charges against Mr. Biden in California, has turned to women closest to Mr. Biden to document his drug use, revisiting some of the most embarrassing episodes in the Biden family’s recent history — in the heart of an election year.

Almost all the events at issue in the trial happened in 2018, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was out of office.