Tragic Details About The Hogan Family

Terry Bollea, known by many as wrestling icon Hulk Hogan, is one of the most recognizable men on the entire planet. From the red and yellow color scheme to the bandana and mustache combination, it's hard for someone like Hogan to stay out of the public eye. It's because of this that, along with The Hulkster, his immediate family have gone on to become genuine celebrities in their own right.

The Bollea family was the subject of the reality TV shows "Hogan Knows Best," and later "Brooke Knows Best" which mainly followed his daughter Brooke around during her day-to-day life. While those collectively ran for a total of four years on VH1, the family members have not been able to get out of the spotlight in recent years, and it's not always been for the right reasons. 

Hogan himself still makes occasional appearances in WWE, with the most recent being on the January 6, 2025 episode of "WWE Raw," which also acted as WWE's official debut on Netflix, where he was booed out of the building by the fans in Los Angeles, California, something that The Hulkster wasn't even that shocked about. He is still a presence every week in the form of his "Real American Beer" company being an official sponsor of WWE, but the fact that Hogan, one of the people who took WWE into the mainstream, simply brushed off the negative reaction he received shows just how polarizing he, and his family, can truly be.

There've been scandals, numerous problems with the law, and internal family feuds that have all made the headlines over the years, all of which will be covered here, as well as some members of Hogan's extended family, who have got even more tragic life stories than some people might have originally suspected.

Since we've already mentioned her, let's begin with Hogan's daughter Brooke, who is also partly the reason why the Bollea family is in the news again.

To put it simply, Brooke's relationship with both of her parents is extremely fractured. As recently as March 2025, Brooke's mother Linda revealed that she hadn't actually spoken to her daughter in almost eight years, to the point where Brooke didn't tell either of her parents that she had given birth to twins, something that her mother was very hurt by. Linda blamed this on Brooke's relationship with her dad, which is almost as bad as her relationship with her mom, with Linda claiming that Brooke and Terry had a massive bust-up that led to her cutting both of her parents out of her life.

Brooke did go to bat for her dad in 2015 when he was caught up in a sex tape scandal that outed him as being a racist (he legitimately said that he was a racist), as he had a problem with Brooke dating a black man. Brooke would also miss her dad's wedding to his now third wife, yoga instructor Sky Daily, stating on Instagram that she wanted to create some space between herself and her family in order to heal properly.

What is she healing from exactly? According to Brooke, she suffered years of emotional, verbal, mental, and physical abuse during her childhood, with Brooke's mother being the main culprit as Brooke claimed "abuse comes in all shapes and sizes." Linda has denied these allegations, but it's not looking likely that Brooke will ever make peace with either one of her parents now that she is happily married and a mother to two children, who she gleefully shares pictures of on her social media pages.

Keeping with the relationship between Brooke and Linda, the former Mrs. Hogan hasn't had it easy when it comes to her personal life in recent years.

After Brooke alleged that she had suffered years of abuse, mainly at the hands of her own mother, Linda clapped back with her own allegations, stating that her daughter had once broken her collarbone and that she had multiple other stories of her daughter having an excessive drinking problem. All of this was eventually shot down by Brooke, who provided proof that she didn't have an issue with alcohol and that her mom was simply lying to try and deflect some of the heat away from her.

As for her ex-husband, Linda has no time for the WWE Hall of Famer. In the same TMZ article where she explained her relationship with Brooke, Linda called The Hulkster a sex addict, and a liar, and that her entire family is a complete mess. Linda, who has not re-married since the divorce she filed for was finalized in 2009, claimed that she never wants to get married ever again, but is still sad at the state of her family, and has given Hogan multiple chances to try and fix what she believes he has broken.

While she has not gotten married again, Linda did make the news in 2012 when she got engaged to her partner, Charlie Hill, on an episode of "Couples Therapy." The reason the engagement made the news was due to the couple's age gap, with Linda being 52, and Charlie being 23, and the fact that their relationship started when Charlie was still only 19. After calling off the engagement, Linda was arrested in October 2012 for driving under the influence but was later released after she managed to post bail.

The first family member not related to The Hulkster by blood, Steven Oleksy has only been a member of the Bollea family for three years, marrying Brooke in 2022. However, due to the ongoing feud between his wife and his mother-in-law, the former defenseman for the Washington Capitals and the Pittsburgh Penguins has ended up getting involved in the family drama as well.

Regarding Linda's comments about Brooke's reported alcohol problem, Oleksy stepped in by posting on his own Instagram account to clear up any confusion that had been caused and to also stand by his wife amidst all the abuse she was receiving from her mother. Oleksy wouldn't even refer to Linda by her name, simply calling her "Jane Doe," and explained that he saw the emotional toll the feud between Brooke and Linda had taken on his wife, and the rest of the Bollea family, and simply wanted to try and put an end to it. Considering that everything seemed to settle down at the time of writing, Oleksy might have actually managed to defuse the situation by simply focusing on his own family.

Outside of the family drama he has found himself in, the only part of Oleksy's life that could considered "tragic" is the fact that he would regularly get sick as a baby, resulting in him needing a pacifier almost all of the time, which in turn led to his teammates throughout the years giving him the nickname "Binky." Apart from that, Oleksy has lived a very successful life having played ice hockey professionally for 18 years, even winning the Stanley Cup with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2017, before retiring in 2023. He is still a regular part of the ice hockey community but is currently focused on raising his children.

Sandwiched in between his marriage to Linda and his current marriage to Daily, Hogan was married to make-up artist Jennifer McDaniel between 2010 and 2021. McDaniel was already painted as a "gold digger" by the media due to the age gap between her and Hogan, with McDaniel being either 36 at the time of their wedding, while Hogan was 53. However, her work in the film industry meant that she was more than capable of standing on her own two feet, even before meeting the WWE Hall of Famer.

The biggest hurdles that McDaniel encountered during her marriage to Hogan were the various scandals that The Hulkster found himself in, which led to his then-wife having to defend him to a certain extent. The 2012 lawsuit that Hogan filed against the website Gawker was based on the fact that the site had leaked a sex tape featuring Hogan and Heather Clem, a woman who was not only the estranged wife of Hogan's friend Bubba The Love Sponge but was also McDaniel's close friend as well. After that, the aforementioned sex scandal that came about in 2015 involving Hogan's racist rant also led to McDaniel having to publicly defend her husband, something for which she received heavy backlash.

Having said all that, McDaniel's marital issues remained private towards the end of the 2010s, so much so that Hogan actually announced that the couple had divorced on his Twitter page in the most Hulk Hogan way imaginable. Hogan said; "Yo Maniacs just for the record, the Facebook and Instagram posts are of me and my girlfriend Sky, I am officially divorced. Sorry, I thought everyone already knew, love my Maniacs4Life." Despite her divorce being made public in such an outrageous way, Hogan and McDaniel are reportedly still on good terms."

When it comes to the recent rant Linda Hogan went on regarding the state of her family, one positive point that she was able to make was that she said her son Nick was still such a good boy. A mother's love is worth twice as much, which might explain why she said what she said about her son, because to put it lightly, Nick Hogan has been anything but an angel over the 20 years.

Nick's love of motorsports led to him earning a Formula D license in 2006 when he was just 16, and over the next 12 months, he would receive two speeding tickets, four points on his normal driving license, and narrowly escape any significant injuries when a car he was driving caught on fire. However, Nick would be involved in a very serious car crash in August 2007, which he would end up going to prison for in May 2008 after being charged with reckless driving involving serious bodily injury, and would spend five months behind bars, serve a total of four years of probation, 500 hours of community service, and be banned from driving for three years.

The passenger during the crash, John Graziano, would sustain injuries that would require medical care for the rest of his life, and following a lawsuit filed by Graziano's family, the Bollea family was ordered to cover the costs of Graziano's medical care. Once he got out of prison, Nick seemed to get his life back on the right track, eventually marrying pornographic actress Tana Lea, but not before his legal troubles cropped up once more in November 2023, when he was arrested for driving under the influence while his father was in the car, and was sentenced to serve one year's worth of probation. 

Moving away from the immediate Bollea family, long-time fans of World Championship Wrestling will remember Horace Hogan appearing on episodes of "WCW Monday Nitro" and "WCW Thunder" towards the tail end of the company's existence. Aside from looking at a version of Stone Cold Steve Austin that you would find on Temu or Wish, many wrestling fans don't have many fond memories of Hogan's work in WCW, despite having a more than respectable career in Japan with companies like FMW. However, Horace Hogan not being the best wrestler in the world is far from the most tragic thing that has ever happened to him.

Horace's parents, Martha Alfonso and Allan Bollea, The Hulkster's real-life brother, would end up separating when Horace was only a child, leading to Martha getting a new boyfriend as Horace grew up. In 1986, Martha's relationship would come to a brutal end when she was murdered by her boyfriend, something that The Hulkster has talked about in his autobiographies, explaining how he wanted to look out for Horace when he arrived in WCW given everything that had happened to him. This would ultimately be another reason why people didn't connect with him in WCW as people simply saw him as someone who was only on TV because he was Hulk Hogan's nephew.

Once WCW went out of business, Horace's wrestling career began to wind down, and even after a brief spell in WWE's developmental system in 2002, he ended up retiring from the business that same year, opting to work for a construction company instead. Horace has since gone on to have a family of his own, having two daughters, but seems to have no intentions of getting back into wrestling, despite his family name having so much weight to it.

We've already mentioned what happened to Horace Hogan's mother, but the tragedy didn't stop there as Allan Bollea, Hulk's brother, also had an incredibly tragic end to his life.

In the same year when Martha Alfonso was brutally murdered by her boyfriend, Allan would tragically pass away from a drug overdose at the age of just 38. Allan and his brother were extremely close, with Allan reportedly being a big fan of his brother's work, which is why The Hulkster is so protective of his late brother given the rumors surrounding him.

Much like Martha's death, Hogan covered his brother's passing in his autobiographies, but during an appearance on Theo Von's "This Past Weekend" podcast, Hogan revealed that there were rumors that his brother was part of a biker gang and that played a part in his death. However, that wasn't the case and Hogan confirmed that it was not only a drug overdose that killed his brother, but it was the fact that he was in desperate need of help and no one came to his rescue.

This would ultimately lead to Hogan actually taking Horace, and his two sisters, in under his own roof and helping raise them while also trying to work a full-time WWE schedule. Hogan would admit that by the time he took his brother's kids in, he was in serious pain due to the number of shows he was working and considered taking time away from the business, but now that he had three kids to look after, he felt as if that he couldn't leave wrestling under any circumstances. Hogan is not one to speak on his brother that much, but you get the sense that his famous catchphrase probably means more to him than some would have originally suspected.

Not a name that many people would have expected to be included in something like this, but Mike Awesome is a distant relative of Hulk Hogan through marriage as he is Horace Hogan's cousin, frequently crossing paths with his cousin during their shared time in FMW together, as well as WCW in 2000, which saw Awesome interact with The Hulkster as well.

Awesome is often regarded as one of the most impressive big men in the history of wrestling, having the athleticism to match some cruiserweight wrestlers, while also having the raw power to powerbomb some of the heaviest performers to ever step in a ring. Awesome rose to fame in the United States through his time in Extreme Championship Wrestling, where his long-standing rivalry with Masato Tanaka was heralded as one of the greatest in company history. He would be the man to take the ECW World Heavyweight Championship from Taz in 1999 but would defect to WCW in 2000, while still under contract and holding the company's top title, leaving him with a complicated legacy amongst ECW fans.

Many ECW fans forgave him after his impressive showing at the One Night Stand pay-per-view in 2005, where his match with Tanaka not only got a standing ovation but also acted as his retirement match as he would call time on his career in February 2006. Sadly, one year after he retired from wrestling, Awesome took his own life as his body was found hanging in his home in Tampa, Florida, with the reasoning behind his death being the collapse of his marriage that saw him arrested and jailed for domestic abuse, and being told by his wife that she was leaving him while he was incarcerated, leading him to become very depressed and eventually suicidal.

When it comes to talking about the tragic side of the Hogan family, there is nothing more fitting than ending it on the WWE Hall of Famer himself, because the fact of the matter is that the fall from grace that Hulk Hogan has had over the years is a tragedy in itself.

We've already mentioned the various sex scandals that he's been involved in, the revelation that he's a self-proclaimed racist, and the fact that even his own family hates him is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Hogan's legacy in the modern climate of wrestling. He has made a boatload of enemies within the wrestling business over the years for a variety of reasons, fans of TNA still haven't forgiven him (or Eric Bischoff) for nearly killing the company in the 2010s, and even non-wrestling fans see him endorsing the current President of the United States Donald Trump and believe that if he's like that, everyone must be, just because of how important he is to wrestling.

Everyone has their own skeletons in their closet, but Hogan's closet has overflowed in recent years, and the reaction he got on "Raw" earlier this year is the culmination of how far he has fallen as an icon in this business. After all, we've already listed a number of reasons why so many people hate him, and the fact that someone as iconic and as important to the wrestling industry is as despised as Hogan is might be the most tragic part of his entire life. Hogan and his family have lived the majority of their lives in the limelight, and if there is one thing that people know about the entertainment industry, it's that it can chew people up and spit them out.