Ashley Biden Knows Who She is

The First Daughter is using what she's learned from her own trauma to help other women heal from theirs.

- By Kayla Webley Adler. Photographed by Celeste Sloman

If you know hardly anything about Ashley Biden, well then, her efforts up until now have paid off. She is the only child of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden-half sister to Hunter and Beau-and she has deliberately kept a lower profile. But even though she's here being interviewed by a national magazine and has enlisted a well-connected publicist, Ashley tells me at least a handful of times during our conversation that she's "never wanted to be in the public eye." And she is clearly anxious about the exposure now: "Yeah, I still don't," she adds.

But being the First Daughter comes with a certain amount of pressure to use the platform handed to you. "It's not like I'm going to go and become a movie star," she says. "But I think that I kind of have an obligation in this position, if I can, to amplify the issues and to talk about what truly, truly works."

Ashley says she is telling her story not because she wants to be in the spotlight, but because she wants to get the word out about the lessons she's learned from her years in social work-in foster care, in juvenile detention, and, most recently, as the leader of a support group for formerly incarcerated women. "It took about two years to get into the groove of being in this position," she says. "I'm doing my work as I always have been, but kind of figuring out the role as First Daughter, and how can I use it in the most positive way, where it's not about me, it's about Americans. And what I've learned is, I want to tell the story of others-I want to lift up organizations and share this information."