‘They’re trying to kill me’: Hunter Biden talks with Moby about the rightwing vendetta against him

Hunter Biden has told the pop star Moby in the first of a two-part podcast interview that the right wing is trying to “kill me” by harassing him to relapse into drug addiction in an effort to sink his father’s presidency.

Related: Hunter Biden lawyer accuses prosecutors of ‘bowing to Republican pressure’

The day after a second set of criminal charges was filed against the US president’s son, this time for tax issues, the interview had Biden describing his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction after the death of his mother, his sister and most recently his beloved brother Beau, and his pride in getting sober four years ago.

“The hard part, the excruciatingly difficult thing to do, is to maintain that when you are literally the focus of a hatred and an intensity that is both specific and global,” Biden said.

Recorded at Biden’s painting studio in San Francisco before the new indictments were filed, Biden told Moby – a friend and fellow recovering addict – about his shame at feeling like the Biden family “f**k-up”, and how he drank and used drugs to mask it.

He also described being doxed – having his personal information and address published – by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, which led to Trump supporters wearing Maga hats shouting through bullhorns outside his house while his wife was eight months pregnant.

“They published a description of where you could stand to see through the floor-to-ceiling windows,” Biden said, which he said drove him and his wife to move into hiding in the middle of the night. He said Maga supporters later brought a “30ft digital billboard on a flatbed truck” and parked it in front of his house.

Moby and Biden met while in addiction recovery programs and have stayed in touch daily for the past three years, with Moby joking, “I did pride myself on trying to be your most irritating friend” by flooding him with text messages.

Describing how Roger Stone, working for Richard Nixon, successfully discredited the wife of the Democratic primary candidate Edmund Muskie – “they labelled her a drunkard” – in order to help Nixon win a comfortable victory in the 1972 presidential election, Biden said, “The times have changed but the players have not,” noting that Stone was a key adviser to Donald Trump.

“They decided that the one way in which they would be able to certainly just undermine my dad’s confidence and ability to continue to campaign and move forward – particularly after the death of my brother – [was] to think that he could lose his son that he just had regained from an almost-death, through addiction,” he said.

“And so they just began to attack, and attack, and attack. And you know, addiction provides for a lot of openings for people.”

Biden said he believes the attempts to discredit him are in the hopes that he will relapse. “There is no doubt in my mind – and this might sound like some crazy hyperbole – is that they’re trying to kill me through other means. And I just won’t let ’em.”

Biden said he does not resent Maga supporters – “for an addict, anger and resentment is Kryptonite, at least for this addict” – because they have been told repeatedly to hate him.

“If you have been fed all of these lies, from that I am a pedophile and a sex-trafficking maniac, then wouldn’t it be incumbent on you to have a deep hatred of me?” he said. “Wouldn’t it be incumbent upon you, if you saw me in a restaurant with my two-year-old on my shoulders, in his little Chewbacca outfit on Halloween, to come running up to me and scream in my face?”

The center of a number of baseless conspiracy theories, Biden described the rightwing media obsession with him as incoherent.

“I am in one sense a mastermind criminal running a global syndicate, and in the other sense I am a degenerate that can’t tie my shoes and I should never have been in business because I’m a moron,” he said. “But I’m running bioweapons labs with George Soros that are going to infect the Russian population?

“It would be funny if it wasn’t so destructive.”

Biden said after years of being advised by “the smart people in the room” to keep a low profile to avoid adding fuel to the fire, he wanted to speak out in part “because it’s not possible, I think, to think that the fire could be any hotter than it literally [is] at this moment”, and to help others in addiction – “particularly men that did not have the advantages that I had in terms of rehab facilities and professionals”.

“One of the reasons why I’m gonna survive this – and I’m gonna survive it clean and sober – is because I am not gonna let these motherfuckers use me as just another example of why people in recovery are never gonna be OK, never to be trusted, they’re all degenerates – I’m just not gonna let that happen.”

Of the political threat his troubles pose to his father, who faces what appears to be a very tight re-election battle in 2024 – almost certainly against Trump – Biden said: “I recognise that none of this is necessarily about me – they are trying, in the most illegitimate way but rational way, they’re trying to destroy a presidency. And so it’s not about me.

“And in their most base way what they’re trying to do, they’re trying to kill me, knowing it would be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle, and so therefore destroying a presidency in that way.”