Candace Owens faces second defamation case over Kirk theories

A witness to Charlie Kirk’s assassination sued podcaster Candace Owens on Monday for suggesting he was involved in the Utah killing. Washington State native Robert Hild became “a target for verbal attack” and death threats by Owens’s followers over her conspiracy theories about the Turning Point USA founder’s September 2025 death, his lawyers said in a 73-page federal complaint. Owens is also facing an April defamation suit from the head of Kirk’s private security over similar claims on Owens’s popular podcast, Candace.

The right-wing media figure “told her audience of millions in multiple podcast episodes that Hild — a private citizen in the crowd at the event where Kirk was assassinated — contributed to Kirk’s assassination, had ties to malicious foreign actors, and was connected to a ‘gothic’ and ‘communist’ ‘underground,’ which she associated with the murder, among other abject and damaging falsehoods,” the new lawsuit said. “Owens neither cares about the truth nor the harmful effects her lies have on her targets,” Hild’s attorneys wrote.