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Melissa Cohen Biden
South African-American (born 1986) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Melissa Batya Cohen Biden (née Cohen; born October 15, 1986)[1] is a South African‐American activist. She is married to Hunter Biden, son of 46th U.S. President Joe Biden.
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Early life and education
Melissa Cohen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She lived in an orphanage and was three years old when adopted by Lee and Zoe Cohen, a South African Jewish couple with three sons.[2][3] She attended King David High School Victory Park, a Jewish day school, before studying interior design at Greenside Design Center College of Design in South Africa.[4][5] She moved to Los Angeles when she was 21 years old to attend the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Later life
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While in Los Angeles, she met American businessman Jason Landver. They married in 2011 and separated in 2014.[6] Cohen was an advocate for environmental and nature conservation groups.[4]
After her divorce, Cohen launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about tribal communities.[7]
In 2019, she met Hunter Biden, son of then-former U.S. Vice President and presidential candidate Joe Biden, through friends. She helped Hunter Biden seek treatment for substance use disorder.[8] They have matching "Shalom" tattoos on their left biceps.[2] On May 16, 2019, six days after meeting, they married in a ceremony at her apartment in the Hollywood Hills.[9][10][11] In 2019, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States.[1]
Their son, Beau, was born in March 2020 in Los Angeles.[12][13] She is the step-mother to Biden's three adult daughters—Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy—with his first wife and to the daughter, Navy Joan Roberts, he had in 2018 with Lunden Roberts.[14]
She attended the inauguration of Joe Biden in 2021.[13]
She and her family live in Malibu, California.[15]
In June 2024, she accompanied her husband to his trial on federal gun charges, where he was found guilty on all 3 counts in Wilmington, Delaware. During a break in the trial on June 4, she confronted Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to President Donald Trump, outside the courtroom. Cohen approached Ziegler, pointed her finger at him and said in a loud voice, "You have no right to be here, you Nazi piece of shit." Her husband had filed a lawsuit against Ziegler, who has been compiling a searchable database of emails discovered on Hunter Biden's laptop, in September 2023.[16][17]
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References
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