Robert O’Neill, a former Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden, is suing a podcaster duo for $25 million. According to court documents, detailed by the NY Post, the podcasters are claiming O’Neill lied about killing the terrorist.
Robert O’Neill was part of the ultra-elite military unit that hunted down Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011. Three years later, he publicly claimed that he fired the fatal shots that killed the terrorist.
“He was standing there two feet in front of me, hand on his wife, the face I’ve seen thousands of times,” Robert O’Neill told Fox in 2014. “I thought, ‘We got him, we just ended the war.”
O’Neill has spoken in public about it several times. Meanwhile, the US government or the Department of Defense – now Department of War – has never confirmed who fired the killing shot, or the identity of who participated in the raid.
Several SEALs have disputed – as well as avoided confirming – O’Neill’s claim. Now, the veteran is suing two podcasters who, the soldier says, are lying about him.
According to O’Neill, Antihero Broadcast podcasters Tyler Hoover and Brent Tucker have spread conspiracy theories about him. Per the NY Post, he filed a lawsuit in Westchester County Supreme Court on November 10 against the podcasters.
Former Navy SEAL who killed Osama Bin Laden sues podcasters
Hoover and Tucker have claimed that O’Neill has lied about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Meanwhile, O’Neill says their ‘crusade’ against him began in 2023.
The podcasters, both military veterans themselves, addressed O’Neill on a podcast episode in August 2023,
“Besides the Rob O’Neill who didn’t kill bin Laden,” Tucker said. “I am not going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was on the mission.’ I’d be as big a liar as Rob O’Neill.”
He continued, “I worked with a lot of those guys, still friends with some of them. And you’ll never meet one where you go, ‘Hey, you know Rob O’Neill?’ And they go, ‘Oh yeah, he’s a great guy, he killed Bin Laden.’ They won’t do it.”
One episode on their YouTube channel was titled “Rob O’Neill: The Web of Lies,” and last year they accused the decorated veteran of changing his story.
“You [O’Neill] were just the last guy to put a round in Bin Laden,” Tucker said.
Robert O’Neill is now suing the podcast duo for $25 million. The defamation suit cites that the allegations made against him by Tyler Hoover and Brent Tucker have caused “psychological and physiological harm.” He further accused the podcasters of having “failed to perform even basic due diligence.”
Robert O’Neill says accusations are “not true at all”
Speaking to the NY Post, O’Neill said, “The story that I’ve been truthful with the entire time is that I had one [other] guy [on the mission] in front of me.”
“He went one direction at the top of the stairs to confront what he thought was a suicide bomber. I turned the other way, and Osama bin Laden was standing there, and so I shot him three times. I killed Osama bin Laden.”
He added: “What [Tucker and Hoover] are saying is not true at all,” concluding that he’s disappointed that the podcasters are targeting a fellow veteran.
“The vet-on-vet thing has gotten a little bit out of control, and I would like to have it stop,” O’Neill told the NY Post.
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