Brooke Hogan says she did not speak to her father for two years before he died in July 2025, and that her split from Hulk Hogan hardened after she rejected his inner circle. She said he once told her, “You go this way, I go that way,” as the two moved farther apart.
In an interview published as the one-year mark of Hulk Hogan’s death approached, Brooke said she was pregnant with twins and newly married when she stepped back. “I was pregnant with my twins. I was newly married. I just had to take a break,” she said. She welcomed Oliver and Molly in January 2025 with her husband, former NHL player Steve Oleksy, whom she married in June 2022.
Hulk Hogan died at 71 after suffering a heart attack at his home in Florida. At the time, he was married to Sky Daily, his third wife, after they wed in September 2023. Brooke said she does not know whether she and her father would have reconnected even if he had lived, because of where his mind was at the time.
“I don’t know if we would have ever reconnected, even if he were alive, because of the mindset he was in,” she said, adding that she felt powerless in the final years of his life. “You feel so powerless,” she said. “I’m glad he’s out of pain. I know he was in a lot of pain,” she added, saying he could be difficult to reach emotionally because “he just didn’t want to talk about it.”
The estrangement also played out publicly. Brooke said her mother, Linda, posted in March 2025 that Brooke “doesn’t talk to us” and “didn’t tell us” when she got married or had her twins. Brooke said she had been “verbally and mentally abused since childhood,” and said a recent text Linda sent to Oleksy was “so cruel and so brutal” that it ended any chance of reconciliation.
Brooke said the family rupture was older than any single post or message. She described a home life that left her unwilling to keep trying, and said, “No child wants to not have their parents.” In her telling, the door did not close with her father’s death. It had already shut long before that.
