Chances are Tucker Carlson didn't eat many TV dinners growing up. But according to the sister he barely acknowledges, he now wants more than his share.

The multi-millionaire former Fox News host is embroiled in a bitter he-says-she-says battle with his heiress stepsister Dr Roberta 'Bo' Hunt over the Swanson TV dinner family fortune she claims he is not entitled to, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal.

Carlson insists he doesn't want the money yet his name appears in court documents demanding $2,414 a month. 

Hunt is the only biological child of Patricia Swanson Carlson, heiress to the Swanson frozen food firm famed for its iconic foil-wrapped dinners of the 1950s. Patricia adopted Carlson and his brother Buckley in 1979.

When the Daily Mail asked him about the stepsister he grew up with, Carlson claimed: 'I don't know who this person is really.' 

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 Carlson 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.'

'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 Carlson and his brother Buckley have improperly received a total $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 Carlson 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 Carlson responded by apologizing to voters for endorsing Trump's re-election campaign in 2024.

With his legacy as a conservative thought leader under threat, Carlson 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.

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'.

Carlson'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 sculpture career 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 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.

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 Carlson's dad began an affair. Dick Carlson 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.'

Asked by the Daily Mail whether he grew up living in the same home as Hunt, Carlson 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 Carlson and Buckley, her mother and their father beside them.

And other, much more recent pictures show Hunt and her children dining with Carlson and his family at an Easter brunch in Washington, DC, around 2008 and hanging out with his Carlson'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.

'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.

Carlson'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 Carlson and his brother Buckley have an 'illegitimate claim' to the Swanson wealth. 

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.'

Carlson 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. 

Carlson'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 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.'