Hunter Biden acknowledged that explicit photographs and messages tied to his struggles with addiction were contained on the device commonly referred to as "the laptop," while arguing that the narrative surrounding it was built on false claims and political manipulation.

In a post on X Thursday, Biden said he would refer to the device as "the laptop," even though he contends the name is misleading and that its provenance and chain of custody were never conclusively established.

"I will call it the laptop because by now the word belongs to something larger than a piece of hardware," Biden wrote. "It belongs to a story they needed me to confirm, and I am done letting them tell it."

He disputed the widely circulated narrative surrounding the device's origins, arguing that efforts to assemble damaging material about him predated the laptop's emergence from a Delaware computer repair shop.

He wrote that by the time a hard drive was turned over to an attorney for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, individuals had already spent more than a year traveling internationally in search of information about him.

"The laptop did not surface and create a scandal," Biden wrote. "A scandal was constructed, and a laptop was produced to anchor it."

At the same time, Biden acknowledged that the material associated with the device included deeply personal evidence of his addiction.

"Here is what was on it," he wrote. "Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Messages sent at hours that don't belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight."

He described the contents as documenting "the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster."

Biden said he is "not denying any of it," adding that recovery requires confronting, rather than erasing, the record of addiction.

"That is not a small thing to say," he wrote. "Recovery does not erase the record. It requires reading it. I have read mine."

However, Biden said he rejects what he characterized as false claims surrounding the device and the broader controversy.

"What I will not do is accept their lies," he wrote.

The essay, which Biden said will be published in its entirety on his Substack page, marks Biden's latest public response to years of scrutiny over the laptop and its contents, an issue that has been central to Republican investigations and political attacks against the Biden family.