Jill Biden has said she crossed paths with Joe Biden’s former wife Neilia just a month before her death in a car accident in December 1972.
According to her new autobiography, Where the Light Enters, Jill Biden’s former husband Bill Stevenson was a major supporter of Joe Biden’s first Delaware Senate run. The Stevensons ended up attending Biden’s victory party in Wilmington. It was there where Jill Biden, now 67, first laid eyes on Neilia Biden.
“She had an easy, natural beauty that made her look almost out of place in the frantic crowd. Even surrounded by strangers vying for attention, she seemed calm, with a warm, genuine smile,” Jill Biden writes. “From across the room, you could see how happy she was — happy, and incredibly proud.”
Eventually, Jill spontaneously greeted Neilia walking up to her for a handshake, said, “Congratulations on your win,” and exchanged pleasantries.
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“I didn’t know much about her, but in that instant, I thought about how picturesque their family was — the handsome young senator, trying to better the world; his beautiful, loving wife, representing their family, always there to cheer him on; and three adorable kids,” Jill Biden wrote. She said she did not meet Joe Biden that night or at any other time before a blind date in March 1975.
Jill Biden describes how that meeting “stuck with” her, particularly on the day of Dec. 18, 1972, when Neilia Biden and the couple’s 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident. Their sons Beau and Hunter survived the crash. Neilia was 30.
“I barely heard a word after the news about Neilia and the baby. I pulled my car into the student parking lot and switched off the ignition. Neilia was gone, along with their little girl. It was profoundly unfair — to take a mother from her children; to take a daughter from her father. Joe Biden had had everything, and in a horrible second, it was gone,” she writes.
Jill Biden married Bill Stevenson in 1970 but the “marriage fell apart” before their eventual divorce in 1976.
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