Whatever Happened To Brooke Hogan?

During the 1980s and 1990s, there was no bigger figure in the world of professional wrestling than Brooke Hogan's father, Hulk Hogan. Having translated his popularity in the WWF (later changed to WWE) to mainstream stardom, Hulk starred in movies, TV series, and became a fixture in the pop culture landscape by declaring, "Whatcha gonna do when Hulkamania runs wild on you?"

As his wrestling career seemingly wound down in the 2000s, the erstwhile Terry Bollea followed in the footsteps of Ozzy Osbourne and his family by entering the milieu of reality television with "Hogan Knows Best." The VH1 series proved to be a hit with viewers, running for four seasons between 2005 and 2007 while taking viewers inside his family life. "Hogan Knows Best" introduced his wife Linda and their two teenage kids, Nick and Brooke.

For Brooke, the show served as a launching pad for a music career, with the series following her father's attempts to use his fame to propel her toward pop stardom. Of course, those who've followed the family's trajectory since then know that Hulk and Linda's marriage ended in a particularly messy divorce. But what happened to the aspiring singer after the show ended? It's been a tumultuous, bumpy ride, so buckle up.

The cancellation of "Hogan Knows Best" came in the midst of Hulk Hogan's divorce from wife Linda due to a cheating scandal, along with their son Nick's involvement in a high-speed car crash that left another man with severe brain damage. Brooke, however, sidled away from those scandals and stepped out on her own with "Brooke Knows Best," her own spin-off reality show that debuted in 2008 and ran for two seasons.  

She wasn't all alone, though. While the series followed her ongoing quest for pop stardom, she was joined by best friend Ashley Menendez and choreographer Glenn Douglas Packard. Interviewed by "Access Hollywood," Brooke addressed what it had been like to forge ahead on her own in both music and reality TV, while trying to distance herself from her family's tabloid-covered scandals. "I don't feel pressure," she insisted (via Today.com). "I do feel like if someone can see me slip up, you know, they would love it because it would complete the family craziness." However, she added that wasn't likely to happen. "I'm not naturally the type of person that likes to party and start trouble," she said.

Brooke Hogan had a promising start when her first single, 2004's "Everything to Me," rocketed to the top of the charts, followed by the release of her debut album, "Undiscovered." Her second album, 2009's "The Redemption," didn't perform nearly as well, selling a paltry 15,000 copies. That same year, VH1 brought the axe down and canceled "Brooke Knows Best."

In 2012, with her music career on the ropes, Brooke decided to fall back into the family business, so to speak, when she joined TNA Wrestling. As TNA President Dixie Carter told BANG Showbiz at the time, Brooke had signed on as an executive overseeing The Knockouts, the wrestling league's recently launched female wrestling division (via CTV News). Naturally, this role also included an on-air presence. "When [Brooke and I] did talk wrestling," Carter revealed, "I not only loved her passion and knowledge of it, but the fresh, creative ideas she would come up with. She is very savvy." Carter continued, saying, "I asked if she would consider teaming up with me in this capacity while she also worked on her music, and I was thrilled when she said 'yes'. A big personality runs in her genes, obviously, and I know she is going to take an already exciting division of 'IMPACT Wrestling' to another level."

Hogan's stint with TNA didn't last long. A little more than a year later, she parted ways with the league in a split that was reported to be amicable.

In 2013, Brooke Hogan revealed that there she was moving forward with the new man in her life: NFL star Phil Costa, center with the Dallas Cowboys. In a June 2013 Instagram post that has since been deleted, Brooke revealed that Costa had popped the question, and the two were making preparations to walk down the aisle. "Happiest moment of my LIFE. I am marrying my best friend I [wouldn't] choose anyone else," she captioned the photo of Costa proposing to her (via TV Guide).

Sadly, the engagement didn't last for long. Just a few months later, Hogan and Costa had split up. As her rep told E! News, "Brooke moved back to L.A. [from Dallas] a couple of weeks ago to be closer to her mom Linda Hogan and she is currently in the studio working on her album. She's halfway through [the album] and expects to release it in the spring."

The following year, Brooke's dad, Hulk Hogan, revealed he'd been instrumental in sabotaging the relationship. "I love the Dallas Cowboys, been a fan forever. But my daughter was engaged to one of those guys and he didn't walk the walk and talk the talk," Hogan stated during an interview with Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan (via CBS News). "I put a bullet in that really quick. There was no way my daughter was going to marry somebody that I don't like that got me mad, or has got in my face."

Brooke Hogan made a valiant effort to strike out on her own while putting some distance between herself and her family's ongoing scandals, but it wasn't always easy. Such was the case in 2015 when an audio recording of Hulk Hogan was leaked, in which he used an array of racist language while complaining about all the money he squandered trying to spark his daughter's music career. "She is making some real bad decisions now," Hogan said, as reported by Radar Online. "My daughter Brooke jumped sides on me. I spent $2-3 million on her music career, I've done everything like a jackass for her." He went on to accuse her of sleeping with Black men to advance her career while repeatedly using a racial slur. 

Hogan was summarily fired by the WWE and subsequently issued an apology. "It was unacceptable for me to have used that offensive language; there is no excuse for it; and I apologize for having done it," he said in a statement to "Entertainment Tonight."

Brooke responded to the controversy in an unusual way: by sharing a poem that she'd written about her dad on Facebook, titled "If You Knew My Father." In the poem, which was captured by the New York Post before Brooke deleted it, she insisted that Hulk Hogan, despite his words, was not a racist. "Human isn't perfect, and perfect is not he," she wrote, "but I can tell you one thing, it's just not what it seems."

At the same time that Hulk Hogan's racist rant was making headlines in 2015, Brooke Hogan was in the midst of a career reinvention, which, sadly for her, didn't receive nearly the same degree of press as her dad's scandal. Interviewed by radio station Big Frog 104, Brooke revealed that her recent move to Nashville had made her fall in love with country music, and she was relaunching herself as a country artist. "I fell in love with Nashville because of the songwriters," she explained. "I really learned that art of songwriting in Nashville," she added. "It's hard for me to listen to anything but country."

While her turn from pop to country may have been unexpected, Hogan insisted that it was simply a natural part of her own musical evolution. "People always want to box you in and say well, what are you?" Hogan told "Entertainment Tonight." "You have to be country, or you have to be pop, and I am like, what if I was raised on a bunch of music? What if I just love music?"

The release of Brooke Hogan's 2015 country EP, "I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend," and its single, "Fly Away," were not as successful as she'd hoped. The following year, news emerged that Brooke was in the process of reinventing herself yet again with a return to the comfort zone of professional wrestling. As TMZ reported, Brooke began forming a new all-female wrestling league by teaming up with some other kids of pro wrestlers, including the daughters of wrestlers Diamond Dallas Page, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, and Kerry Von Erich, in addition to the daughter of Belgian action movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme. 

Hogan discussed the new venture in a June 2017 interview with Uproxx. "We've got a roster of 40-plus women, so there's some really incredible talent that we've got," she said, revealing that plans were underway for this new wrestling league to start touring that September.

In 2018, Brooke shared more about her league in an interview with "Access Live," saying she also wasn't ruling out stepping into the ring herself. "I'm considering it. I'm thinking about it. I have had training — probably not enough," she said.

Ultimately, Brooke Hogan's plans for an all-female wrestling league did not take flight, but Brooke was far from idle. In 2017, she made a return to reality television when she hosted "The Fashion Hero," a Prime Video competition show for models, challenging the traditional notion of modeling by seeking women of all shapes and sizes — not just tall and reed-thin. The following year, she appeared on the MTV reality show "The Challenge" in the "Champs vs. Stars" season. 

While hosting a reality competition is one thing, competing in one is something else entirely, particularly such a physically demanding show as "The Challenge." "I was finally getting my life together, to kind of jump back into all that scared me on a personal level," she told TV Insider. "I didn't know if I was mentally braced for this."

Meanwhile, Hogan was still making music. In 2019, she unveiled a new single, "Touch My Body," representing a shift away from country music and back to the pop sound for which she was best known. The single's music video also reunited her with her former "Brooke Knows Best" co-star Glenn Douglas Packard, who directed it.

By 2020, Brooke Hogan had multiple projects on the go, including a clothing line, more music, and an unexpected venture that seemed to come out of left field. "I released a song, I'm doing a workout legging line and ... well I don't really tell anybody, but I have an interior design business out of Nashville," she revealed during an interview with LA Weekly. "So I've just been working on growing that, making things bigger and better there too." She continued, saying, "You have to have a real job when the entertainment business doesn't work out."

The design business, BB Designs by Brooke, reunited her with her former "Brooke Knows Best" co-star, Ashley Menendez. The company isn't a typical design business, as it has a very specific clientele in mind: people who rent out their homes on Airbnb. "If you haven't heard, I started an AirBnB design company in Nashville a few years ago, and it's doing really well!" Brooke wrote in a 2021 Facebook post.

As Hogan explained in an interview with The Tennessean, she'd previously been flipping houses in Nashville, renovating and designing the places in order to sell them at a profit. "So I can dabble in doing the home renovation and fulfill my other creative outlets, and then also do music," she explained.

From a chart perspective, Brooke Hogan's music career peaked when she was still a teenager. That was when her debut single, "About Us, made it to No. 33 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006. While that remains her only song to crack the charts, she's continually refused to throw in the towel.  

In 2020, she released another single, "Move," which she felt marked the next stage of her musical maturation. "I think [the single is] sexy and mature — it's a good transition from everything I've done," she told LA Weekly. According to Hogan, "Move" also reflected where she was in her own life, which wouldn't be well reflected by a banger meant for nightclub DJs but captured a whole other vibe. "Music you can drink wine to and chill out to," she explained. 

Meanwhile, Hogan had also figured out what had been missing in her previous musical endeavors: control. "I've been nice, tried to do it the way everyone said to, and all I did was wait," she wrote in an Instagram post, musing on how she'd never truly felt in control of her musical career. "From the outside — so many people are like 'what the heck is up with her music career?' Answer: I never took the wheel."

Throughout Brooke Hogan's life, any efforts she's made to establish herself as an individual have typically been hampered by her parents' drama. That has been particularly true of her dad Hulk Hogan, who's ping-ponged from one controversy to the next in recent years, from his leaked sex tape (and ensuing legal victory over it) to his shirt-ripping introduction for presidential candidate Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention. 

Brooke's parents' nasty divorce has continued to overshadow her — something she commented on during a candid 2021 interview with Distractify. "Something that kind of stunk about my parents' divorce is that it left my brother and I, just our whole family sprawled out and imploded," she said. "We just went in every direction. I think I moved like 16 times."

Not only has the situation left scars, it also put a huge strain on her relationship with her mother, Linda Hogan. "I mean my mom and I don't talk, which is kind of like our third stint of going and doing that, and it is sad," she added. "We haven't been able to have that breakthrough but I'm hopeful though for the future."

In January 2024, Brooke Hogan took to Instagram to share some news: she'd secretly gotten married. In that post, she posted a photo of herself and her husband, professional hockey player Steven Olesky. "A rare sighting of the husband," she wrote in the caption. "We like to keep to ourselves, but somehow the news is out." 

News of her marriage, it turned out, wasn't all that new. As TMZ reported, Brooke and Olesky, who'd played in the NHL with the Washington Capitals and the Pittsburgh Penguins, had actually tied the knot in 2022, but they managed to keep their marriage under wraps for more than a year. 

As Brooke subsequently told TMZ, even though she's a celebrity known for appearing on reality television, she actually treasured her privacy. "We asked people to try to respect it because, you know, I've been through so much stuff in my life," she said, explaining how she managed to enlist friends and family to say mum about her marital status. "I was like, 'the one thing that feels like it's just so untouched and it's so pure, I just don't want to let the claws of fame sink its teeth into our relationship."

When Hulk Hogan walked down the aisle for the third time in 2023, marrying yoga instructor Sky Daily who is 25 years his junior, Brooke Hogan was conspicuously absent from the big day. Brooke addressed questions about her decision to skip the nuptials in a lengthy statement she posted on Instagram. "Instead of leaving it to speculation, I decided it's better to shut it all down here," she wrote. "As we all experience this with our own families, the dynamics of a family unit continuously change over the years. With that being said, my family has experienced a LOT of change." She ended her missive by declaring, "I have chosen to create some distance between myself and my family, and am focusing on people and things that heal my heart and align with my own personal beliefs, goals, and values."

While that statement may have raised more questions that it answered, Brooke's mom, Linda Hogan, shed more light on the situation in a Facebook post, blaming her ex-husband for her daughter's decision to remain estranged from both parents. "His actions turned her against the whole family," she wrote in a social media post, adding the hashtag #LivingThatNarcissistLife. "Brooke has dumped our entire family!" she continued, revealing that when her daughter married Steven Olesky, only his family was part of the celebrations, alleging she and her ex were apparently not invited (via Wrestling News).