In June 2024, several social media posts published a video of a naked man chasing a woman in a hotel hallway, claiming the man was Hunter Biden:
(@@GenXNewsOnX/X)
This post on X had gained more than 695,000 views, 17,000 likes and 16,000 shares as of this writing. The video spread in some instances with the claim that this was indeed Biden, and others questioning whether the claim was true.
This claim, however, was false. The man in the video has a tattoo of two thick black vertical stripes on his left shoulder:
(screen capture)
Biden also has a back tattoo, though it looks nothing like the one in the video. According to multiple reports, including by The Daily Mail, he has a tattoo of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. One of the photographs leaked after his abandoned laptop was recovered depicts Biden showing off his new tattoo (you can tell it is new by the plastic film covering it, something tattoo artists do to help the skin heal):
The tattoo is a meaningful reference to where his mother, U.S. President Joe Biden's first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, was born and raised, Skaneateles. The town is located at the top of Skaneateles Lake, one of the Finger Lakes:
(Google Maps)
Hunter Biden's mother died in a car accident when he was 2 years old. He and his older brother, Beau, who died of cancer in 2015, had a younger sister, Naomi, who died alongside her mother in the accident.
It was not clear where the viral video was filmed, or who the people in it were. It was shared on Instagram at least as early as May 27, 2024, with no reference to Biden.