A longtime criminal defense attorney who says he leaked the video of the Ahmaud Arbery shooting to bring the truth to light has been caught up in a swirling controversy himself.

"If we tell the truth, we get justice," Alan David Tucker of Tucker & Browning said Tuesday in a phone interview from his office in downtown Brunswick. "It's why we take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

Tucker said his motivations have been misconstrued, and his words manipulated, to convey a false narrative. He said he's been inaccurately portrayed as leaking the video to try to justify the actions of the men who've now been arrested and charged with murder: Gregory McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 34, a father and son. Tucker said he's been accused of violating the attorney-client privilege—some lawyers have threatened to have him disbarred, he said—even though he is not representing the McMichaels or anyone else involved in the case. But he said some lawyers have told him he acted with honor.

Tucker said his mother and stepfather live in Satilla Shores, the subdivision where Arbery was killed on Feb. 23. He said they've been afraid for their safety because of protests over the shooting and outraged posts on social media, escalating as time wore on without arrests.

Tucker was pulled into the tragic story on April 30, when Greg McMichael came to his office for advice—not as a client, but as a friend. Before he retired, the elder McMichael was an investigator for the local district attorney. Tucker, 63, has been a criminal defense attorney in the area for 39 years. They knew each other from their work.

Tucker said rumors circulating in the community about what happened were wildly inaccurate. The police had been in possession of the video of the shooting since it happened but had not made it public. "The video needed to be seen," Tucker said.

Tucker said he received a cellphone with the video the next day—late on Friday, May 1. He waited until Monday, May 4, when his technically savvy paralegal came in to help him create a clear image of the video in a shareable form. He had it delivered to a local reporter friend, who shared it on social media. The attorneys representing the Arbery family immediately began sharing it on social media as well, as did a lot of other people. The governor, the attorney general and the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation saw it. They offered the GBI's help on May 5, which was accepted by the prosecutor who'd been assigned the case after two others recused. Two days later, the McMichaels were arrested.

The day after, Friday, May 8, GBI Director Vic Reynolds held a 9 a.m. news conference in Brunswick, saying he had found sufficient probable cause to make the arrests and that his office would continue investigating every aspect of the case. He preempted by an hour a scheduled protest over the lack of arrests. That event continued with a new mantra repeated there and in public comments from the Arbery family civil rights attorneys: "It wasn't because they saw the video, it was because we saw the video."

That same Friday morning, Tucker said, he arrived at his office to find a national news crew. They had been waiting for an hour by then. He said he gave a 20-minute interview that was cut to about 20 seconds—enough time for half a sentence. That half-sentence suggested that, if Arbery had frozen instead of fighting back when a man approached him with a gun, maybe he wouldn't have been shot. The implication, Tucker said, was that he was somehow suggesting Arbery deserved to die—which is absolutely untrue, he said.

"There are a whole lot of 'maybes,' but the problem is, it did happen, and it's unfortunate, it's horrible. I'm not by any means trying to justify anything," Tucker said.

The context of that half-sentence, Tucker said, was that he asked the reporter, "Have you ever had a gun pointed at you?"

"I have, on three occasions," Tucker said in the interview, giving his own answer to that question. "You don't know what you'd do until it happens." Tucker said in the interview that the choices are: flee, fight or freeze. Tucker said that, in his own situation, he made the calculation that the safest option was to freeze. And he survived.

And what were those three occasions? One was a robbery. One was the police, Tucker said.

And the other? An ex-girlfriend.

Asked if any of them were former clients, Tucker said, "I've never had a client point a gun at me."

Tucker said he's never wanted to be anything other than a criminal defense attorney. The dream began when he was 6 or 7, around first grade, watching "Perry Mason" on a black-and-white television. He told his then-single mother he wanted to be a lawyer. She told him to go for it.

Tucker grew up on St. Simons Island near Brunswick on the Georgia coast, where he still lives. His parents divorced when he was 5. He said he and his mother and brother didn't always have enough to eat. His first job was working for a restaurant for 50 cents an hour. He was 11. When he was older, he got a better paying job on a construction crew "swinging a hammer" for $3 or $4 an hour, he said.

With that hammer, he said, he worked his way through school: Glynn Academy in 1974, Oral Roberts University of Tulsa in 1978 and the University of Georgia School of Law in 1981.

His first legal job was as a staff attorney at what he calls "the notorious" Georgia State Prison in Reidsville.

In 1982, he opened his own law practice in Brunswick. Since then, he has won acquittal in six murder trials, he said. He said he still has a robust criminal defense practice, but some clients have trouble paying. He also handles personal injury, workers' compensation, business law and real estate.

The civil side of his practice is the reason he decided not to represent Greg McMichael after the arrests. And that brings the story back to the video. Tucker said he went public with a statement identifying himself as the leaker because the Glynn County Police Department—in a letter that would be made public—asked the GBI to investigate how the video was released, and the GBI announced its agreement to do that. He was afraid police officers would be unfairly blamed and get into trouble with their superiors for leaking the video, he said.

Once Tucker's name was swept into the national story, he said, the publicity quickly reached successful plaintiffs lawyers who regularly hire him as local counsel. Out of public relations concerns, he said, those attorneys said they'd have to part ways if he took on McMichael's defense.

"I eat well now," he said. "I don't want to go hungry again."

Tucker's mother remarried 35 years ago, and she and her husband—Tucker's stepfather—moved to Satilla Shores. At the moment, though, Tucker said she's staying with him and his wife on St. Simons because she's afraid to go home.