Sean is an entitled brat and Liar, just like his mother
"Just because your father’s a tennis legend and your mother is an Oscar winner doesn’t mean you can’t use a little extra cash.
At least that’s the case for Sean O’Neal, the 28-year-old son of John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal. The LA-based photographer set up a GoFundMe page on March 2 asking the public to give him $10,000 so he could make prints for an upcoming photo exhibition.
“I wanted to do this on my own . . . without asking for handouts from my family,” he tells The Post.
There’s one problem: The exhibition never existed.
Although Sean’s GoFundMe page stated that money collected would go toward a show to be put on by Miami’s Jewish Museum of Florida and the Anti-Defamation League, his now ex-manager, Barbara Assante, admits to The Post that, in fact, there was no confirmed exhibit. Rather, the fund-raising was more broadly to help Sean pay for printing and framing his art in pursuit of a show.
Sean, who says he was deceived by Assante, has since shuttered the page, returned the $858 raised, and fired Assante.
“[Sean] was the one who got things mixed up and moved a little too quickly before things were confirmed,” says Assante. (The Anti-Defamation League had no comment.)
Sean says he’s in dire need of funds to pursue his art following a Jan. 14 surgery to fix a chest injury sustained six years ago. “I was swinging on a [tree] branch in Ireland and I fell,” he explains. “I broke my sternum, clavicle and rib.”
Although Sean said on GoFundMe that the operation had left him “in debt,” he admits he has yet to be billed for the procedure, performed at USC’s Keck Medical Center.
“I think I’m going to have to pay like $30,000, even with insurance,” says Sean.
Not everyone is sympathetic to the plight of the poor rich boy who grew up on the Upper West Side. Sean’s father, now a sports commentator, is estimated be worth $50 million, and his maternal grandfather, “Love Story” actor Ryan O’Neal, is said to have about $15 million to his name.
“Sorry, you’ve got a lot more money than anybody I know. This is weird,” commented one man on the fund-raising page.
Sean, who studied theater at Occidental College in Los Angeles and is currently unemployed, has supported himself by working as a busboy and a Lyft driver.
“It’s very hard to be an artist in this economy,” he explains. “It makes me feel good about myself to try to raise the money myself and do it on my own two feet.”
His mom Tatum echoes that sentiment to The Post. “My oldest son [Kevin] is a bartender in New York struggling to make ends meet, my daughter [Emily] does babysitting. The idea that kids who come from what are perceived to be wealthy families — it isn’t always what it seems to be.”
Tatum also spoke out on her son’s Go Fund Me page.
“Sean does not speak to his father,” she wrote. “Nor am I aware if his father speaks to him.”
Sean says he does speak to his hotheaded father — infamous for his on-court tantrums — but admits that they are “on and off.”
“My dad and I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on . . . the way I should live my life,” says Sean.
Sean grew up in Manhattan with his older brother, author Kevin, and younger sister, Emily, an actress. He enjoyed the perks of fame-by-association, such as hobnobbing with his mom’s celeb pals, including Kate Moss.
But after John and Tatum’s 1994 divorce, Tatum — who won an Oscar in 1974 at age 10 for her performance in “Paper Moon” and who has battled drugs since age 14 — relapsed into a heroin addiction.
“My brother and I were really intuitive,” Sean recalls. “Any time we knew something was off [with Tatum’s drug use], we . . . stayed in our rooms . . . [or] went to movies and played basketball.”
Tatum, now reportedly sober, insists she’ll be in charge of Sean’s career from now on. “Sean hadn’t yet started vetting stuff through me,” she says of his hiring of Assante. “Now everyone has to go through me.”
