She Met Hunter Biden One Night at a Club. Then She Fell in Love.
The New York Times
A chance meeting in December 2017 plunged Zoë Kestan, a downtown “it” girl and social media star, headlong into an unpredictable affair.
When Zoë Kestan first met Hunter Biden she didn’t know who he was. His father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was no longer in office, and she didn’t read the news much anyway.
As far as Ms. Kestan knew, as she neared the end of her shift at Vivid Cabaret, the Midtown Manhattan strip club where she performed, Mr. Biden was just another V.I.P. client with the clout to book a private room in the wee hours of the morning.
And Ms. 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 Ms. Kestan exposed to the world, via Mr. 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 Ms. Kestan — as one of the most extensive observers of Mr. 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, Ms. 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 Mr. Biden’s national notoriety left her with whiplash, unsure of who she was.
