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Hunter Biden is set to undergo a psychological evaluation lasting up to seven hours next month, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal. The thorough mental examination is part of his defamation lawsuit against former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne, 61.
In a joint filing with Byrne’s lawyers on September 17, Hunter agreed to a battery of psychological tests to help establish whether he was emotionally damaged by Byrne’s claims of corruption against him. Hunter, 54, sued the ex-CEO in Los Angeles federal court last year, claiming Byrne falsely accused him of soliciting a bribe from Iran.
Byrne (pictured) posted to his then-290,000 followers on social media site X claiming Hunter contacted the Iranian government offering to have his father Joe Biden ‘ unfreeze’ $8 billion of their funds in exchange for an $800 million bribe. ‘These defamatory statements by Byrne are not merely false and not merely malicious — they are completely outrageous,’ Hunter’s November 2023 complaint said, adding the allegations were ‘complete nonsense’.
Byrne is a Trump supporter who pushed the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, as well as negative claims about Covid-19 vaccines. Hunter’s attorneys said instead of retracting his bribery claims when he was told they were false, Byrne ‘doubled down’ and republished them.
A September 17 filing in the case declared Hunter was ‘seeking emotional distress damages in connection with his claim for defamation’, and agreed to the examination to prove it. Hunter’s mental exam is set for October 11, and will be conducted by Dr. Nathan Lavid in Long Beach, California. ‘The parties hereby agree that the defense may conduct a single mental examination of plaintiff,’ the joint legal notice read.
‘No one will accompany plaintiff into the examination room. The examination will be limited to seven hours of face to face interview time and psychological testing.’ Lavid will use ‘diagnostic tests, including but not limited to a clinical interview of plaintiff and a testing period during which Dr. Lavid will administer a variety of standardized written tests,’ according to the filing.
Byrne stepped down as chief executive of the retail company Overstock in 2019 after the share price dropped when he started making cryptic comments about the ‘deep state’. He also admitted in a letter to investors in August of that year that he had a romance with Maria Butina (pictured), a Russian agent subsequently jailed for illegal influence peddling. Hunter’s suit against Byrne is one of several civil actions the First Son is still embroiled in, after receiving two guilty verdicts in the federal gun and tax crimes cases he faced this year.
He is suing the IRS for allegedly improperly releasing his personal data – though whistleblowers who ran the agency’s criminal probe into the tax cheat First Son said they made disclosures to Congress through proper legal channels. Hunter has also sued Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani and former White House staffer Garrett Ziegler for allegedly hacking his data by handling his abandoned laptop.
But he could be fighting his lawsuits from prison in just a few months’ time, as his sentencing hearings loom in December. He is set to be sentenced for his gun crimes in Delaware on December 4, and for his tax crimes in Los Angeles on December 16 – for which he faces a maximum penalty of 17 years incarceration. His father has promised that he will not pardon him or commute his sentence.
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