The former first daughter, Ashley Biden, has filed for divorce from her plastic surgeon husband, Dr. Howard Krein.
The two were married for more than 13 years before Biden, 44, filed for divorce in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas on Monday, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. To commemorate the occasion, the youngest child of the former president turned to social media.
In a since-expired Instagram Story, she was walking through the park as she was flashing a thumbs-up sign to the song “Freedom” by Beyoncé. She also shared a quote on her Story that read, “New life, means new boundaries. New ways of being that won’t look or sound like they did before,” which was set to the song “Freedom Time” by Lauryn Hill.
Biden and Krein were married in Greenville, Delaware, in 2012. The ceremony had taken place at the same church where Biden was baptized, St. Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic Church.
The couple originally met in 2010 through Biden’s late brother, Beau, who died from cancer in 2015. Following their marriage, they moved into a $1.3 million home in Philadelphia, where Krein works as an otolaryngologist and plastic surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
Biden briefly discussed her father’s involvement in the wedding as she introduced the former president at the Democratic National Convention in 2024.
“At the time, my dad was vice president, but he was also that dad who literally set up the entire reception,” she said. “He was riding around in his John Deere 4-wheeler, fixing the place settings, arranging the plants, and by the way, he was very emotional.”
Following her father’s decision to step aside from the 2024 Presidential Race to pass the torch to former vice president Kamala Harris, Biden recalled her father’s support for her as an independent woman growing up, calling him the “OG girl dad.”
“Joe Biden is the OG girl dad,” she said. “He told me I could be anything, and I could do anything.”
In tandem with her mother and former first lady Jill Biden, the two women depicted the president as a relentless champion of women who, in the end, had made the decision to step aside to enable his female vice president to rise to the top of the ticket.
“He wasn’t just a girl dad. I could see that he valued and trusted women,” Biden said, with strong emphasis on the final word.
