Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The podcasters dismissed the case as baseless.
A former Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden has filed a $25 million defamation suit against two podcasters he accuses of spreading false claims that he fabricated the story of the 2011 mission.
Robert O’Neill, who served on the elite SEAL Team Six, filed the case in Westchester County Supreme Court on Monday — just ahead of Veterans Day — saying the hosts of the Antihero Broadcast have spent more than a year attacking his credibility online.
Online accusations
According to court filings reviewed by The New York Post, podcasters Tyler Hoover, 37, and Brent Tucker, 45, began their campaign in 2023, using their YouTube platform — which has about 120,000 subscribers — to allege O’Neill lied about firing the shots that killed the al-Qaeda leader during Operation Neptune’s Spear.
“Besides the Rob O’Neill who didn’t kill bin Laden,” Tucker said during an August 2023 episode according to the filings, before declaring, “It is the worst-kept secret in all of special ops.”
He went on to suggest O’Neill’s teammates refused to endorse his version of events.
O’Neill, 49, maintains he was the one who confronted and killed bin Laden during the May 2, 2011, raid in Pakistan — a fact he said was supported by retired Adm. William H. McRaven, who led the operation.
Defending his record
“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,” O’Neill told The New York Post.
He went on to describe in details, how his fellow SEAL went up a flight of stairs in pursuit of an alleged suicide bomber, and that O’Neill turned the other way, instantly facing bin Laden.
O’Neill then shot the Al-Qaeda leader three times, he claims.
In later podcasts, Hoover and Tucker claimed O’Neill had changed his account, accusing him of backpedaling on the number of shots fired and his exact role in the mission.
Tucker even claimed in October 2025 that the absence of a lawsuit was proof he had been telling the truth — a remark made just weeks before O’Neill filed the suit.
O’Neill told The Post, he finally decided to take legal action because the harassment had not stopped.
Pushback from the accused
Tucker dismissed the case as baseless, claiming other SEALs had questioned O’Neill’s story and argued that any reputational harm was self-inflicted due to O’Neill’s past legal troubles.
According to CBS, prosecutors later dropped a DUI charge against O’Neill, while the status of a separate assault case remains unclear. Hoover has not commented publicly on the lawsuit.
Sources: The New York Post, CBS
This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation
