JD Vance often mentions her on the campaign trail, Amy Adams plays her in a movie and her Alcoholics Anonymous meeting attendees just know her as “Bev.”
Vance’s mother Beverly Aikins has been a fixture of the Ohio Senator’s life since he entered politics, and he mentioned her struggles again during the vice presidential debate in October.
“I was raised in a working class family,” he said in his opening comments at the debate. “My mother required food assistance for periods of her life. My grandmother required Social Security help to raise me. And she raised me in part because my own mother struggled with addiction for a big chunk of my early life.”
Ms Aikins has been sober and clean for 10 years from alcohol and heroin, according to The New York Times.
In that decade, her son wrote a bestselling memoir which became a movie, was elected to the US Senate and has now ascended to become the GOP vice presidential nominee. As Vance’s profile rose to the national stage, so did his mother’s.
Here is everything we know about JD Vance’s mother.
Ms Aikins grew up in an abusive household. Her mother Bonnie was abused by her father, who was a “violent drunk,” according to Vance’s memoir. Ms Aikins, raised in a chaotic environment, went on to provide a similar upbringing for her own children, Vance says, including what he called a “revolving door of father figures.”
The nurse had her first child Lindsey at the age of 19. Five years later, she gave birth to Vance. Ms Aikins’ parents’ volatile relationship had calmed by the time her children were growing up, providing a safe haven for her young son. He dedicated Hillbilly Elegy to them, writing that his grandparents were “without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me.”
When Vance was just a toddler, his father walked out on his family. Years later, his parents officially divorced.
“Dad gave me up for adoption when I was 6,” the now-senator wrote. He was adopted by Bob Hamel, his mother’s third of five husbands, according to the memoir.
At some point, she began abusing substances.
Vance’s mother told the Times that it all began one day at work when she suffered a headache and decided to take a Vicodin pill to ease the pain. She enjoyed the sensation that came with it, the outlet wrote, and soon after started stealing Percocet and other, stronger pills. She eventually lost her job, her nursing license, and her access to these drugs. So, she turned to heroin. “My brain loved it,” she told the outlet.
Vance documented one particularly harrowing experience from this period of his life. Once while in the car with his mother, she accelerated to “what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both,” he claimed in the memoir. She eventually slowed down, only to turn around and beat him in the backseat of the car, he alleges. Vance said he hopped out of the car and ran to the home of a neighbor, who called the police.
After that, his grandparents took care of him — and he took the last name he is now known by.
Ms Aikins hit rock bottom in 2015, living out of her car, the Times reported. She checked into a sober living facility in nearby Covington, Kentucky. Once she got out, she found an apartment to live in back in Middletown — but it was “in the ghetto, and it used to be a trap house,” she told the outlet, referring to a place where illicit drugs are sold.
But she remained tough. It was around that time that Vance first told her about Hillbilly Elegy. She recalled the conversation to the Times: “He said, ‘Mom, I wrote a book, and there’s probably some things in it that aren’t very favorable.’” She replied: “Will it help you heal?” He said it would.
At the Republican National Convention in July, Vance gave a tribute to his mother: “I’m proud to say that tonight, my mom is here, 10 years clean and sober. I love you, Mom.” Teary eyed, she stood up as the crowd cheered for “JD’s mom”
