No Evidence Hunter Biden Tried to Pay Rent in 'Art Made With His Own Feces'

In response to the news that U.S. President Joe Biden had pardoned his son Hunter Biden in December 2024, venture capitalist Shaun Maguire claimed on X that his family had rented an apartment in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, to the younger Biden in 2019 but was stiffed $300,000 in rent payments.

Maguire insisted that the rumor was true. His post read: "So what happens to the $300k+ in back pay rent that Hunter Biden owes my family from 2019-2020? Is that pardoned now? Thanks Joe (This is a true story)."

Maguire further alleged that Biden offered to pay the debt in "art made from his own feces" after not paying rent "for over a year." These claims were repeated by several media outlets, including Fox News and Inside Edition (with the latter featuring a photo of the alleged rental property).

Publicly available records obtained by data broker BeenVerified indicate that Maguire, or entities linked to him or his family, did own a Venice Beach property shown in some reports, including the Inside Edition story above, from at least 2017 to 2022. The only problem is that Biden, based on a reconstruction of his locations compiled by Snopes from several sources, never lived there.

Maguire did not respond to our request for evidence to support the claim that his family once rented property to Hunter Biden, or that the latter offered feces-involved artwork as a form of payment.

No Evidence Biden Lived in Venice Beach in 2019

In several posts, Maguire asserted that Hunter Biden rented a Venice Beach apartment from his family between 2019 and 2020. However, this claim does not match the reality of Biden's life during that period.

Following a failed attempt at sobriety, as Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir "Beautiful Things," he spent the early part of 2019 living in a series of "low budget, low expectation motels" between Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecticut, where his life primarily revolved around his addiction to crack cocaine.

The Biden family, including the president, attempted to intervene during this period by inviting him to a family dinner in Delaware. After lying to his family about checking into a Maryland rehab facility, Hunter Biden returned to Los Angeles. He wrote in his memoir that he touched down at LAX airport "in March 2019."

Biden wrote that he "spent the first couple of weeks at an Airbnb in Malibu." He then moved into a West Hollywood boutique hotel — Petit Ermitage. He rented one night at a time, he wrote. He eventually wore out his welcome and, by May 2019, was told he had to vacate the hotel. As this was happening, a patron of the Petit Ermitage introduced Biden to his now wife, Melissa Cohen, a South-African activist and filmmaker.

On May 17, 2019, after a whirlwind six-day courtship, the couple married on the roof of Cohen's West Hollywood apartment building. In July 2019, he was successfully served a subpoena at a West Hollywood apartment linked to his new wife (following several unsuccessful attempts throughout June and July), providing independent corroboration of Biden's West Hollywood residency at that time.

Soon after their marriage, the couple moved to a home in the Hollywood Hills, according to news reports and his memoir. Biden was reportedly living in that home before the end of 2019. A February 2020 story in The New York Times, featuring an interview conducted in part of his residence, described the home as "a pool house-turned-art studio in the Hollywood Hills."

In short, Snopes found no evidence Biden or his future wife resided in Venice throughout 2019. There are no public reports stating that the pair moved away from the Hollywood Hills until 2021. In that year, he did rent a property in Venice. That property, however, is different from the one linked to Maguire. 

Other Issues With Maguire's Claim

Maguire's tale comes with other red flags. His X timeline makes numerous references to popular talking points about Hunter Biden's laptop and related controversies as far back as 2022. Yet the first and only time Maguire mentioned having him as a tenant was in his widely shared post. On top of this, Snopes has not identified any legal proceeding linking Maguire to Biden in any way.

In an additional post, Maguire shared a photo of what he alleged to be a notebook of Hunter Biden's artwork.

However, the handwriting on this purported artwork does not match that of Hunter Biden based on a comparison of documents written by Biden that were released as part of a congressional investigation into the president's son. 

Maguire's story is suspiciously similar to a claim made by the Daily Mail in 2023 that concerned a Venice property Hunter and Melissa Biden reportedly rented in 2021. The outlet alleged that the Bidens stiffed the owner, Sweetgreen CEO and cofounder Jonathan Neman, out of three months' rent, leaving the property in a state of disrepair. While these existing reports may have added a veneer of credibility to Maguire's claim, they are far from evidence for his more salacious allegations.

In fact, no credible evidence has been presented to support the claim that Biden rented a Venice Beach home in 2019, owes its owner $300,000 in rent or that he attempted to square that debt with "art made with his own feces."