It seems unlikely that Tucker Carlson had a childhood filled with TV dinners, but his half-sister claims he’s now vying for a slice of the Swanson family fortune.
Tucker, the former Fox News host with a significant net worth, finds himself in a heated dispute with his stepsister, Dr. Roberta ‘Bo’ Hunt. She contends that he is seeking a portion of the Swanson TV dinner legacy that she believes is not rightfully his, according to an exclusive report by the Daily Mail.
Although Tucker maintains he has no interest in the money, court documents list him as requesting $2,414 monthly from the estate. This legal entanglement adds a layer of intrigue to the family’s dynamics.
Hunt is the sole biological descendant of Patricia Swanson Carlson, an heiress of the Swanson frozen food empire known for its iconic 1950s foil-wrapped meals. Patricia became the adoptive mother to Tucker and his brother Buckley in 1979, blending the family together.
In response to inquiries from the Daily Mail about his stepsister, Tucker remarked, “I don’t really know who this person is,” highlighting the strained relationship within the family.
But we clearly touched a nerve. ‘She’s bonkers,’ claimed the 56-year-old former Fox News host, denying any knowledge of the legal wrangling.
For her part, Hunt, 61, a Georgia-based college professor, decided to step out of the shadows armed with a trove of family photos, financial records, and a legal complaint stating Tucker has been wrongfully receiving their late mother’s inheritance.
‘I’m not saying I hate him or that he’s a bad person,’ Hunt told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview. ‘I just want him to do what he knows is the right thing.’
Dr Roberta ‘Bo’ Hunt is speaking publicly for the first time about the lawsuit against her adoptive famous brother, Tucker Carlson – who has denied knowing her
Hunt and Tucker became family after her mother, Patricia Swanson Carlson (right) – heiress to the TV dinner fortune – married his father, Dick Carlson (left), and adopted his two sons
‘The rest of my family don’t want Tucker lying and getting away with it because he is Tucker Carlson.’
Hunt’s lawsuit against the TV star boils down to a sibling squabble over less than $2,500 per month, marking an ignominious decline for the Swanson family, once revered in Nebraska for their success and philanthropy.
Hunt claimed in a 2024 legal complaint that Tucker and his brother Buckley have improperly received a total of $21,727 each from her mother’s trust since she died in 2023, arguing that the document written by her grandfather says the money should only go to blood descendants of the Swanson line, not adoptees.
The courtroom battle is being waged as Tucker is swiftly becoming one of the most divisive figures in Republican politics.
Last month, his longtime ally, President Donald Trump, told ABC News that ‘Tucker has lost his way.’ This week, Tucker responded by apologizing to voters for endorsing Trump’s re-election campaign in 2024.
With his legacy as a conservative thought leader under threat, Tucker now also faces an attack on his adoptive Swanson inheritance and the carefully constructed story of his upbringing.
The saga dates back to 1968 when Gilbert C Swanson, son of the TV dinner company’s founder and Hunt’s grandfather, set up a trust to pass on substantial wealth to his ‘lineal descendants’ in the belief he was encouraging his children towards committed family lives.
Instead, Gilbert, who died that year aged 62, set the scene for a family feud more than half a century later.
Family photos shared with the Daily Mail, including this onefrom 1982, show Hunt (white dress) posing alongside her mother, stepdad, and adoptive brothers Tucker (circled) and Buckley (far right) at her debutante ball
The photo of Tucker (left) and brother Buckley (right) with Roberta as young siblings casts doubt on his claim that they barely knew each other
The Swansons’ holdings were estimated to be in excess of $100 million at the time, almost a billion dollars in today’s money, after the sale of their food business to Campbell’s Soup Company.
Their largesse was renowned in Nebraska – and executed with flair. For one ‘Hawaiian Evening’ gala thrown by Gilbert and his wife at the Omaha Country Club, they imported 70 tons of sand and live palm trees from the West Coast to transform the patio into a ‘beach’.
Thanks to their philanthropy, the family name adorns an Omaha public library, an elementary school and a Creighton University dormitory.
As a 1979 New York Times profile put it: if the Swansons were late for a flight, the plane waited.
So when 18-year-old daughter Patricia announced to her father that she had secretly married beau Howard Feldman, Gilbert felt the need to scramble to protect the family legacy.
He demanded his daughter sign over control of her inheritance to the family lawyers, then set up a trust that stipulated Swanson riches could only pass to grandchildren ‘born in lawful wedlock’, according to Hunt’s 2024 lawsuit.
The Carlson brothers’ entry to the Swanson family was a little more turbulent than ‘lawful wedlock’.
Patricia Swanson (above) excluded her daughter from her will, Hunt claims, while the Carlson brothers continued receiving trust payments
The Swanson empire – famed for its iconic TV dinners – amassed a fortune now at the center of a family feud
Dick Carlson, a former TV newsman, gained custody of Tucker (right) and his younger brother, Buckley, (center) before they were adopted into the Swanson family
Tucker’s biological mother was an heiress herself: Lisa McNear Lombardi, born to a family that owned three million acres of ranch land across four states, with oil and gas rights.
After majoring in architecture at UC Berkeley, Lombardi met and married Tucker’s father, TV newsman Dick Carlson, and moved to Los Angeles, where she had the two boys.
There, seeking to pursue her career as a sculptor and distance herself from her privileged upbringing, she joined the entourage of renowned artist David Hockney.
‘She was more like a hippie, arty kind of person. I couldn’t ever imagine her being a mother,’ former West Coast editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine Joan Quinn told Business Insider in 2022. ‘She was ill-content.’
Molly Barnes, who exhibited Lombardi’s work in the 1980s, remembered her as ‘bohemian’, ‘very ambitious’ and ‘someone who was fighting the establishment.’
According to Dick’s divorce filings, Lombardi also fell into ‘alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine abuse’ that ‘left her incapable of properly caring’ for the children.
Tucker put it succinctly in his father’s obituary: ‘His wife departed for Europe and didn’t return.’
In 1975, Dick got full custody of Tucker, then six, and Buckley, five, and moved to the affluent San Diego suburb La Jolla. Lombardi died of cancer in France in 2011, having never seen her sons again.
Once ensconced in La Jolla, the Carlson pad became the venue for high society dinner parties where future California Governor Pete Wilson and author Theodore Geisel – aka Dr Seuss – were regulars.
More recent photos show Hunt with her children and her mother (left) dining with Tucker and his family at an Easter brunch in Washington, DC, around 2008
Tucker (circled) at the same Easter event with his family
Another picture shared with the Daily Mail shows Hunt (right) hanging out with her sisters-in-law, Susie (center) and Melissa, at Tucker’s home around 2010
Two streets away lived Patricia, married by then to architect George Hunt, and their teenage daughter, Roberta.
Patricia had married George in the Swanson’s Omaha mansion aged 22, just a week after her father’s funeral in 1968.
But Hunt says her father left her mother after she and Tucker’s dad began an affair. Dick moved in with his two sons around 1977, leaving Hunt feeling like ‘an afterthought’ in the family throughout her teenage years. Patricia adopted the Carlson boys in 1979.
‘It was all about Dick Carlson and his boys,’ Hunt, a Georgia Military College professor, said. ‘Whenever anything would go wrong, I was always the one who got in trouble.’
Hunt said she and her new stepfather ‘never got along,’ and the ‘animosity’ strained her relationship with her mother.
‘She always took their side. Even being older, when they were married, it was always that they did no wrong,’ Hunt said.
She said Dick convinced Patricia to send her to Kents Hill boarding school in Maine in ninth grade. ‘As far away as you can possibly get.’
‘It was a toxic thing with him being involved,’ she said. ‘I think he married my mom for money, and I will die thinking that.’
Roberta even received a Christmas card in recent years from the former Fox News host and his family. Photo provided by Roberta Hunt
The former Fox News host, meanwhile, claims he has had ‘no contact’ with the woman suing him over the Swanson family fortune
Asked by the Daily Mail whether he grew up living in the same home as Hunt, Tucker took on an indignant tone, characteristic of his expressive on-screen persona, and replied: ‘No!’
‘I’ve had no contact with this person in more than 30 years,’ he added, claiming he last saw her ‘in the 1980s’, and that ‘I don’t know who this person is really.’
But a family photo from 1982 shows an 18-year-old Hunt on the night of her debutante ball, flanked by a grinning, suited Tucker and Buckley, her mother and their father beside them.
And other, much more recent pictures show Hunt and her children dining with Tucker and his family at an Easter brunch in Washington, DC, around 2008 and hanging out with Tucker’s wife at his home around 2010. She also shared with the Daily Mail a Christmas card she said she received in recent years from the former Fox host.
‘I don’t know why he would lie about it,’ Hunt said.
‘They must have amnesia, especially because I sent them these pictures about eight months ago.’
But she admitted that relations had been tense for decades.
Hunt claimed that on one occasion in the years before her mother’s death, Patricia and Buckley asked her and her cousins to sign papers that would confirm the inclusion of the Carlsons in the Swanson grandchildren’s trusts.
According to Hunt, the bad blood came to a head in 2023 when Dick allegedly failed to tell her that her mother had a stroke. Above, at Patricia’s bedside in the hospital in 2023
Hunt – above, with her mother’s coffin – also claims she was forced to say goodbye to her mother in the morgue after her stepfather, Dick Carlson, scheduled the funeral on the same day as her daughter’s graduation
Patricia Swanson Carlson died on November 18, 2023 at the age of 78
‘They tried to get us to sign off that Tucker and Buckley were family,’ she said.
‘I got a cryptic text from my mother, saying, “Somebody’s going to call you from the bank, don’t worry about it, just sign it.”‘
‘I said, I’m not going to do that. That’s when things went downhill with Tucker and Buckley.’
Hunt said the bad blood came to a head in 2023 when Dick allegedly failed to tell her that her mother had a stroke.
Tucker’s father refused to reveal where the ailing Patricia was hospitalized, she claimed. Hunt said she resorted to hiring a private investigator to find out.
When her mother died days later, she claimed Dick also refused to schedule the funeral on a day other than her daughter’s graduation, forcing her to say goodbye to her mother in the morgue.
In the following months, she found the Carlsons were drawing thousands of dollars from her late mother’s trust, her lawsuit claims.
Hunt filed a legal complaint in Omaha, Nebraska, in September 2024, alleging Tucker and his brother Buckley have an ‘illegitimate claim’ to the Swanson wealth.
Swanson patriarch Gilbert C Swanson helped create the frozen food fortune now being fought over in court
Swanson, the son of the TV dinner company’s founder and Hunt’s grandfather, set up a trust to pass on substantial wealth to his ‘lineal descendants’. He died in 1965
She alleges a trust established by her grandfather specifically bans inheritance by anyone other than blood relatives, excluding adopted family members.
And she makes it clear the lawsuit is personal, pointing out that the Carlsons never knew her grandfather, the source of the disputed legacy, while to her, he was ‘Big Poppa’.
‘He got me sick on pistachios, I used to sing to him,’ she said. ‘I was told I was his favorite.’
Tucker claims he has had nothing to do with the trust or the court case.
‘I have never taken a dollar of the money,’ he said. ‘I’m not involved in any way. I have never responded to anything.’
But filings from 2025, submitted on his behalf without a lawyer, acknowledged it is ‘true’ he received thousands a month from the trust.
Later filings say he and his brother hired attorneys who are taking the case to trial in August.
Tucker and his wife, Susie, have built a life far removed from the Swanson family’s Omaha roots
Tucker’s filed answer to Hunt’s inheritance lawsuit last year claimed that she had been ‘specifically disinherited’ by her mother in a 2014 will, and that he and his brother are ‘permissible beneficiaries’ of the TV dinner cash.
Hunt agreed that she was not bequeathed anything in her mother’s will, but because she was ‘taken care of’ by her father’s side.
As the Omaha court case continues, it remains to be seen whether the Carlson brothers will keep their share of the Swanson money.
But either way, Hunt, a devout Christian, says each will ultimately receive what he is owed.
‘They can be mean,’ she said, ‘and when they die, that’s what they have to deal with, how they’ve conducted themselves on this earth.’
