At times tragic, at others tawdry, the turbulent history of the Biden clan was one that the mainstream US media was long happy to ignore.

Even during those times when the family couldn’t escape negative attention, one relief for the other Biden family members was knowing at least they weren’t Hunter.

With his struggles with crack addiction, interest in prostitution and online pornography, along with an illegal firearms purchase, Hunter was often the family member drawing headlines, leaving his kin a bit more undisturbed.

This was especially accurate for his half-sister Ashley. Her own struggles, such as consistent drug issues, a sex addiction, affairs outside of marriage, and becoming ‘hyper-sexualized’ at a young age, were exposed through a stolen diary. Though shocking, her revelations briefly caught attention in 2020 before the spotlight returned to Hunter’s messy story.

Now, however, Ashley is in the spotlight once more after revealing she is ending her 13-year marriage to plastic surgeon Dr Howard Krein.

In the grand tradition of the Bidens, her announcement was bizarre.

Following her filing for divorce in a Philadelphia court, Ashley celebrated by sharing a series of songs about freedom and motivational quotes on Instagram.

They included video footage – since deleted – of her walking through a park and giving a thumbs-up, to the tune of Beyonce’s song ‘Freedom’.

Then-Vice President Joe and Jill Biden with daughter Ashley and their son-in-law Dr Howard Krein in Singapore in 2013

She also reposted a message stating: ‘New life, new beginnings means new boundaries. New ways of being that won’t look or sound like they did before.’

This was accompanied by a burst of Lauryn Hill’s song Freedom Time.

Additionally, Ashley shared another uplifting quote—’let your smile change the world, but don’t let the world change your smile’—though she mistakenly attributed it to reggae musician Bob Marley.

It has yet to emerge what prompted the couple’s split – although Dr Krein was still sufficiently close to Ashley last year that he was with her in the Oval Office as President Biden dramatically announced his decision that July to abandon his re-election bid.

However, cuts forward to November, when the Bidens gathered for Thanksgiving in Nantucket, he was not in a group photo – and Ashley was not wearing her wedding ring. They have no children.

Ashley Blazer Biden, now 44, began dating Dr Krein, who is 58, in 2010 after they were introduced by her late brother Beau.

He proposed to her on a cliff in Big Sur, California, in late 2011 after reportedly getting her father’s permission.

Biden, who was then vice president, told People magazine: ‘This is the right guy. And he’s getting a helluva woman.’

A practicing Catholic, Ashley married the Jewish doctor in an interfaith ceremony at a Catholic church in Delaware in 2012.

The couple then flew largely under the radar as they lived in Philadelphia where she was a social worker and he worked at a local hospital.

Ashley and Dr Krein married in her parents’ backyard in June 2012. They are now divorcing after 13 years

Although she had little involvement in her father’s campaign she was, inevitably, wheeled out come election time last year.

As the only child of former First Lady Jill Biden, and only living daughter of Joe (whose other daughter by first wife Neilia died aged 13 months in a car crash in 1972 along with her mother) Ashley was always going to be politically valuable – chiefly in providing the obligatory touching family anecdotes and tributes that, in the circumstances, were much better coming from her than from troubled Hunter.

Her other half-brother, Beau, had died of brain cancer in 2015, leaving a widow, Hallie, who went on to have a relationship with Hunter and develop her own crack cocaine addiction.

In a speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Ashley really pulled out all the stops as she brought ‘Dad’ to tears after introducing him – astonishingly – as ‘one of the most consequential leaders ever in history’.

Ashley recalled how ‘OG Girl dad’ Biden had become ‘very emotional’ at her wedding reception in her parents’ backyard.

‘I thought that I would be a mess, but he was the one crying and I was the one who had to comfort him,’ she said.

So far so good; Ashley certainly looked like the wholesome antidote to her troubled half-brother.

However, disaster would soon strike for her public image

Back before the 2020 election, Ashley’s private diary had been stolen and sold for $40,000 to the conservative activist group Project Veritas.

At first, the Biden family didn’t explicitly deny the diary’s authenticity but – as with the sordid leaked contents of Hunter’s infamous laptop – allowed some media outlets to speculate that it may be fake and another cynical attempt to damage the Biden name.

James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, said they never published the diary’s contents because Biden’s lawyers refused to confirm it was genuine.

Snopes, a fact-checking website, initially assessed the contents of the diary as ‘unproven’ and only changed it to ‘true’ four years later.

Although its contents were later published by another website, the diary got little media traction.

In the event, it seems Ashley and her family got off very lightly as the diary’s contents were at times deeply revealing.

In the tome – whose entry dates ran from January to September of 2019 when Ashley was in her late 30s and in various drug addiction programs – she revealed she’d been in out-patient rehab in Florida and occasionally relapsing at the time.

She also wrote near the beginning of the diary about her sex addiction.

‘I have always been boy crazy,’ she wrote. ‘Hyper-sexualized @ a young age… I remember somewhat being sexualized with [her first cousin] Caroline; I remember having sex with friends @ a young age; showers w/ my dad (probably not appropriate).’

Two months later, she turned to drugs, writing: ‘I relapsed. F***ing again. The difference this time around was that I told Elizabeth, Mom + Dad this morning. Mom + Dad worried but incredibly supportive. I am so lucky to have them on my side.’

But four months after that, she revealed her continued drug abuse had left her on the brink of financial ruin and reduced her father in tears.

‘My dad cried on the phone saying he has the debate in a week + ‘now has to worry about you’,’ she wrote in an entry for July 2019.

‘Maybe he knows what he is doing + it’s worked but my feelings of guilt often are overwhelming.’

The diary also detailed how she was having serious problems in her marriage.

‘Here I am talking about another man when I am married! It all feels strange,’ she wrote in February 2019.

‘Started hanging out with a new guy… It’s been refreshing to be able to kiss another man.’

Biden and Ashley at a drinks reception in 2016 in Washington, DC

Then-Senator Biden proudly holds his daughter Ashley, age 6. His son Hunter, age 17, stands by their side 

Six-year-old Ashley Biden with her father in 1987

Just as her half-brother Hunter carelessly forgot to collect his telltale laptop from a computer repair shop, Ashley had left the diary in a small house near Palm Beach, Florida, where she’d been staying after coming out of rehab.

It was later found by Aimee Harris, who stayed in the same property and sold it to Project Veritas.

Although news reports were claiming the diary was genuine as early as 2021, it was only last year that Ashley herself admitted it was real.

In a statement to the court over the sentencing of Harris for the theft, Ashley described it as ‘my personal private journal’ containing her ‘innermost’ and ‘stream-of-consciousness thoughts’ which, she claimed, had been ‘distorted’.

Ashley added: ‘I will forever have to deal with the fact that my personal journal can be viewed online.’

Harris was sentenced to a month in prison and three months of home confinement.

In fact, the diary’s publication wasn’t the first time that Ashley’s problems with drug and alcohol abuse had been revealed.

In 2009, the New York Post reported that she’d been arrested for possession of marijuana in 1999, when she was a student at Tulane University in New Orleans where she was regarded as a ‘party girl’. She was never prosecuted.

In 2002, she was arrested for allegedly obstructing police officers trying to break up a bar fight in Chicago. The charges were dropped.

The Post said it had also been approached by someone claiming to be a friend of Ashley offering to sell the newspaper a hidden-camera video showing her snorting cocaine. The Post said it declined to buy the footage.

President Biden has reportedly confessed to friends about feeling guilty over Hunter and Ashley’s addiction plights and frets continually about them relapsing.

They in turn were determined not to be the reason he didn’t run again for president and urged him to stand last year.

Of course, they no longer have to worry about that. But the Bidens must now contend with the dissolution of a marriage – Ashley’s – that once provided one of the few bright sparks in a crushingly dark family history.