Let me meet my grandpa: Joe Biden’s secret grandchild makes heartfelt plea
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Five-year-old Navy Joan Roberts grins as she charges out of her bedroom while proudly cradling a postcard of Joe Biden.
When she visited Washington DC last month, her mother told her she could choose anything she wanted from the White House gift shop.
But rather than picking out a board game, puzzle or soft toy of the president’s dog, Navy chose a headshot of the smiling US president to keep in a birdhouse in her bedroom.
It might seem an unusual choice, but Mr Biden, 81, is more to this little blue-eyed girl with soft blonde curls from rural Arkansas than just the head of state – he is her grandfather.
The president is a relative Navy “wholeheartedly yearns” to meet, according to her mother.
“She wants a connection with him so bad”, Lunden Roberts, 33, says from their home in Batesville, while Navy plays with her Barbies in her bedroom.
For years the Bidens refused to acknowledge Navy, who was conceived in the midst of her father Hunter Biden’s crack cocaine addiction.
It stings when Ms Roberts sees the other grandchildren gathered on Air Force One, or when they were embraced by Mr Biden during his inauguration.
“Those are things that children don’t get to do in their lifetime, and she’s of the bloodline and still doesn’t get that chance”, Ms Roberts says, looking down to fiddle with her rings.
“You’re a president that runs on a campaign that talks about embracing people for who they are… well this little girl is Biden blood and you’ve not embraced her, but you can embrace everybody else in the country, and that’s not fair.”
The daughter of Rob Roberts, a gun manufacturer who has gone hunting with Donald Trump Jr, Ms Roberts had an upbringing that could not be further from Hunter’s.
While he was the son of a then rising star of the Democrats in leafy Delaware, she grew up deep in the Republican Bible Belt shooting turkeys and alligators with a hot pink rifle.
After falling in love with the east coast on a school trip, Ms Roberts moved to Washington DC to study crime scene investigation after abandoning her basketball career.
She met Hunter in late 2016 when she and a friend were invited to an after party at his Rosemont Seneca office in the Swedish Embassy.
The former vice president’s son was smoking crack in a pair of boxers covered in parrots. The pair embarked on a yearlong entanglement during which Ms Roberts claims they both professed their love to one another, although she says now he may not have meant it.
In her memoir, Out of the Shadows, which will be released next month, Ms Roberts, 33, details everything from watching Hunter dance on a pole in the gentlemen’s club where she worked, to whisking her off to his father’s Virginia home with his sister-in-law turned girlfriend Hallie Biden – and then there was the time he scarred her by dropping a crack pipe on her chest.
Ms Roberts, who says she has been described as the Meghan Markle of the Bidens, describes her time with the first son as an “adventure” peppered with “scary” moments such as when he nearly overdosed in her arms in a suite in the Rosewood Hotel.
“When you were with him you were proud”, she said. “He didn’t come across like one of the junkies on the street ... he was brilliant.”
After meeting Hunter, Ms Roberts shed her ruby red GOP sympathies and became what she describes as a “mainstream Arkansas Democrat”.
The only time she saw Joe Biden in the flesh was through a window at Beau Biden’s former Delaware home during the time of her affair with Hunter.
Hunter had taken an intoxicated Ms Roberts, who had turned up at his home after a night out, to his late brother’s home on the eve of the anniversary of the car crash that killed his mother Neilia and sister Naomi. Hunter and Beau had also been in the car but survived with multiple broken bones.
At around 10am on the day of the memorial service, Ms Roberts heard someone knocking on the door. She watched through a window as Mr Biden, dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, looked crestfallen as he spoke to his drug-addicted son.
Recalling that moment, she tells The Telegraph: “I see the look on Joe’s face and this pain and this heartbreak, you know, because he sees his son suffering from addiction, and there’s nothing he can do.”
When Ms Roberts told Hunter she was pregnant, she claims he promised to support her, but he shortly stopped returning her phone calls and cut her out of his company’s insurance.
He fiercely denied he was Navy’s father until he was forced to take a 2019 paternity test. It showed he was an even closer DNA match to Navy than her mother.
In his memoir Beautiful Things he described Ms Roberts as “hardly the dating type” and claimed he had “no recollection” of their encounter.
For years the parents were lodged in a bitter legal battle over child support, which was set at $20,000-a-month in 2020.
They reached a settlement last year to reduce the fees to $5,000-a-month on the condition Hunter start building a relationship with his daughter.
Meanwhile, the US president continued to insist he only had six grandchildren and was vilified by even the Left-wing media for failing to embrace his granddaughter.
Last year he finally acknowledged his seventh grandchild, but he has stopped short of communicating with her.
Since September, Navy has frequently spoken to her father during Zoom calls in which she picks out which of his paintings she wants (also part of the settlement) and the pair do arts and crafts together.
“I love my daddy”, she says, beaming in her floral dress.
Asked what her grandfather does, Navy becomes shy.
“He’s the president but I don’t know what he does, he just sits in the White House”, she says while climbing on top of her mother.
While the Bidens frequently talk about the importance of family, Ms Roberts has been devastated by how they have excluded their own flesh and blood.
Moments that have stung included seeing Christmas stockings hung in the White House for each grandchild – and even the dog – but not Navy.
Another blow came when Jill Biden dedicated her children’s book Joey to all her grandchildren – naming each one apart from Navy.
“It’s classless, it’s just tasteless, distasteful. It’s hard to understand the reasoning behind that, because what is the excuse?”, Ms Roberts says.
“As the matriarch of the family, what’s so hard [in] including one child?”
Ms Roberts adds that there is a passage in a book by Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle where Mrs Biden asks everyone to get out of a photograph who isn’t “Biden blood”.
“If you’re so big on Biden blood, what’s wrong with this one?”, Ms Roberts says, shifting in her seat.
“She’s from the same lineage, and quite frankly, Jill isn’t Biden blood but she is.”
If Mr Biden is re-elected in November, Ms Roberts says she won’t push for her child to be involved in the inauguration, but added she also won’t watch it either because it would be too painful.
Security concerns
Another thing that concerns Ms Roberts about the way her daughter has been treated is her lack of security. She is the only first grandchild without secret service protection.
Ms Roberts’ new build home on a quiet cul-de-sac is decorated with cow hides, photographs of her with her daughter and canvases displaying uplifting quotes such as “find the joy in the journey”.
But among the Aztec-inspired décor, a serious arsenal has been hidden to ensure Ms Roberts is never far from a gun.
During the run up to last year’s election Ms Roberts said she had to call her father, “Rambo Pappy”, for help after she came home to find someone in her home on multiple occasions.
“I doubt every single mother is having to board their house up at night to barricade themselves in a room with 12 guns just to go to sleep”, she says.
“They don’t offer security, they don’t protect her in any way”, she says of the Bidens.
Even when we drive to a nearby pond for photographs, Ms Roberts shoves a handgun loosely in her waistband. She claims it is to shoot cottonmouth snakes in case they try to attack us.
Her armoury includes two shotguns behind the headboard, a rifle behind the door, a glock in each nightstand and a third under the mattress.
Ms Roberts says she is considering getting private security to protect her daughter, fearing she is an easy target if someone wanted to attack Mr Biden either ahead of the election or because of his stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
When we get closer to the election they will likely relocate to a “secluded location” that is inaccessible by car.
Being a mother to a first grandchild has also caused a wedge in her romantic life. She has dated two men, one of whom she has a restraining order against while the other said Navy’s father was a “piece of s---”.
Ms Roberts says she is the “black sheep of the family” when it comes to politics. She voted for Mr Biden in the 2020 election, but she’s not sure what she will do this year.
“I’m not a Trump supporter but voting for Joe at this point is also like endorsing my child’s unacknowledgement”, she says.
The next time she will come face-to-face with Hunter will be during his California tax trial, for which she has been subpoenaed.
She’s “nervous”, she says, and thinks they will ask her about the tax returns he sent as part of the child support suit.
During their trip to Washington DC in June, Navy asked to go to the White House.
“She said ‘we need to stop by and see my grandpa, can we stop by and see my grandpa?’”, Ms Roberts says, laughing but also clearly saddened by the memory.
“I was like, ‘Oh, honey, he’s not here, he’s in Atlanta.’”
A disheartened Navy replied: “Maybe next time we come he’ll be in town.”
For the sake of the little girl who disappears to her room clutching a picture of her estranged grandfather, we can only hope at some point he invites her in.
Out of the Shadows: My Life Inside the Wild World of Hunter Biden will be released on Aug 20.
