‘They wanted to steal my humanity’: Artist Hunter Biden blasts New York Post, Daily Mail

Hunter Biden, the artist and second-son of former President Joe Biden, blasted the New York Post and Daily Mail tabloids for running photographs of him in the throes of addiction.

Biden made his remarks in a tweet in which he shared a new artwork based on a photograph of him that he said the tabloids “ran over and over again.” That photograph was reported to have been taken from a laptop he once owned.

Titled Self Portrait #2, the 48-by-60-inch painting rebuilds the photograph as a mosaic of small, multicolored tiles laid over flat planes of blue, tan and deep red. It holds the pose from the original image — Biden bare-chested, both hands pulled up to his head — while breaking his face into pixel-like fragments.

“I set out to paint it because I wanted to take back what they were trying to steal from me. It wasn’t just the image they had stolen. They had stolen thousands of images,” Biden said.

“They wanted to steal my humanity. Their portrait was of a monster. My portrait is of a man being reassembled piece by piece, bit by bit, pixel by pixel through the hard work of recovery.”

Recently, Biden has gained popularity online for his witty social media posts and openness about his past drug addiction and recovery

The laptop became the subject of years of political and legal dispute. While forensic examinations and subsequent reporting found much of its contents to be authentic, critics questioned the device's chain of custody after it was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop and copied before its contents were made public.

Biden has argued that many of the photographs circulated publicly were obtained through the hacking of his iCloud account and has alleged that the publicly released archive includes altered or manipulated material alongside authentic files.

“They averaged about three stories a day between them for years. The image came from their complete theft of my digital life. In the photograph I am in the worst stretch of my addiction. Exhausted. Contemplating how I could end everything,” Biden said.

“They published it over and over because they believed it showed something disturbing, something degenerate, something people would recognize as evidence of whatever they were accusing me of that particular day.”

Earlier this month, Urgent Matter reported that Biden received the Beeple treatment after he was recently revealed to have certified about 100 artworks on the blockchain and started accepting Bitcoin for his art.

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