(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A young man who attended the Sept. 10, 2025, event where conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated has sued YouTube personality Candace Owens for implying that he was part of the plot against Kirk.
Utah man Robby Hild Jr. said in a federal lawsuit filed last week that he has received physical threats as a result of Owens implying that he may have conspired to kill Kirk. His 73-page complaint tells a wild story about how he wound up in Owens’s crosshairs late last year.
According to the lawsuit, Hild attended the Utah Valley University event with a friend named Shaner Broderick. After Kirk was shot at 12:23 p.m. that day, the two ran back to Broderick’s grandma’s house, which was nearby.
A day later, TMZ published camera footage of the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, walking by the grandma’s house earlier in the morning, as well as walking behind the grandma’s house after the shooting. Broderick posted the footage on his Instagram account, remarking on how close Robinson was to his grandma’s house.
Just now reading through this latest Candace Owens lawsuit. She apparently found a photo of a Charlie Kirk event attendee dressed in goth, then jumped to the conclusion that he was part of a "gothic underground" and a "communist underground."
Turns out, he was just wearing a… pic.twitter.com/A4qKrC01vl— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) October 5, 2026
Another few days later on Sept. 14, 2025, Broderick, Hild and Hild’s roommate, Gernot Ohner, decided to walk the path that Robinson allegedly took to the rooftop from where he shot Kirk. Broderick posted selfies of the three men near the stairwell used by Robinson.
That’s when Owens entered the scene. On a Sept. 29, 2025, episode of her show, she shared the photo posted by Broderick—drawing attention to Hild while commenting on the photo.
“And by the way, I’m looking at his the friend on the right and I’m like I don’t know. I’d like to know who that is at the very least,” Owens said on her show, referring to Hild.
Owens had her viewers to investigate Hild. They found a picture of him dressed gothic-style from when he attended a “goth prom” costume party hosted at the Velour Live Music Gallery a local venue in Provo, Utah.
Somehow, Candace interpreted that photo of Hild as him being part of a “goth underground”
“There is a real underground. It is a communist underground. It is real. It is 100% real. It is not imagined, and what they want, the one resource that these people want, are your children,” Owens said on her Sept. 30, 2025, episode.
Owens didn’t stop there. On April 1, she said that Hild was related to the alleged shooter, Robinson. “Certainly, the Hild family is married into the Robinsons as well and so we need to become pretty much genealogists and trace everything and all of the connections,” she said.
However, “In reality, Hild is not a relative of Robinson, nor has he ever met him,” Hild’s lawsuit says.
Owens made several other allegedly defamatory remarks. Hild said numerous people reached out to her to tell her she’s wrong about him. At one point, Owens offered to Hild’s lawyers that she’d correct her mistakes, but she never did, the lawsuit says.
Hild seeks damages for injury to reputation and emotional distress. Owens has yet to publicly respond to the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Owens is also being sued by Kirk’s former bodyguard, Brian Harpole, whom she has implicated in being part of the assassination plot, too.
Harpole sued Owens in April after she aired allegations from a man named Mitch Snow that he saw Harpole, Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk, and Army intelligence officers at Fort Huachuca in Arizona before Charlie’s assassination. Snow’s supposed sighting has fueled conspiracy theories that the group was plotting Charlie’s death. Snow is also a party to the lawsuit.
Owens has a pending motion to dismiss in the Harpole case. Her motion, filed in August, says that Harpole’s lawsuit should be tossed because her statements about him were “inactionable opinions, rhetorical hyperbole, and questions incapable of a defamatory meaning.” She also argues that Harpole hasn’t proven “actual malice,” nor has he plausibly alleged that he was damaged by her.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
