Brooke Hogan Says She Forgave Hulk Hogan After His Affair With Her Friend — So Why Did Their Relationship Never Recover?

Brooke Hogan says she forgave her father, Hulk Hogan, after learning he had been involved with one of her close friends. But she also says their relationship was never the same.

That contradiction is at the center of a new round of attention around the Hogan family. Brooke spoke in detail this week about the affair, the collapse of her parents' marriage, years of family conflict and the estrangement that existed before her father's death in July 2025. On September 25, she also released “Goes Around,” a new song about the family system she eventually chose to leave.

What did Brooke Hogan say about Hulk Hogan and her friend?

Brooke told Us Weekly that a major turning point in her relationship with her father came after his involvement with Christiane Plante, one of Brooke's friends who had worked with her during her early music career.

Plante publicly discussed the relationship in 2008 and said it happened after Hulk and Linda Hogan privately understood that their marriage was ending. Linda had filed for divorce in 2007; the divorce was finalized in 2009.

Brooke's new account is less about relitigating the timeline than explaining what the discovery did to the father-daughter bond. She said she forgave her father, but “something between us changed afterward.”

She also pushed back on the cleaner version of the story in which one person must be the hero and another the villain. Brooke described a family that contained real love alongside betrayal, fear, resentment, money, fame and years of unresolved hurt.

Were Brooke and Hulk Hogan still estranged when he died?

Yes. Brooke had already stepped away from the relationship before Hulk Hogan died of a heart attack at age 71 in July 2025.

But she has repeatedly resisted the idea that estrangement means she stopped loving him. After his death, Brooke said there had not been one explosive final fight. Instead, she described disagreements and circumstances that took an emotional toll over time.

Her latest interview adds an important piece to that history. She remembers feeling safe with her father as a child and describes him as an excellent father to her for many years. She also says the later family dynamic became something she could no longer live inside.

Those statements do not cancel each other out. In fact, that seems to be exactly the point she wants people to understand.

What is Brooke Hogan's new song “Goes Around” about?

“Goes Around” arrived on September 25 as Brooke returned to music with material shaped by her family's long public and private conflict. She told TMZ that the song is not aimed at one individual. It is about what it felt like to live inside the wider Hogan family system.

Brooke said she eventually realized she was not going to become the kind of person she felt that system required her to be. Rather than waiting for everyone else to change, she left.

The song therefore gives the current story a different hook from the old 2008 scandal. The affair is old. Brooke's decision to explain what forgiveness did — and did not — repair is new. So is the fact that she is now putting that family history into music under her own name.

Reddit discussion around the newest interview is still modest, so I would not pretend the internet has reached some grand consensus. But the Hogan family story has had sustained public interest, and one question underneath the latest coverage is more useful than the scandal itself: if you forgive someone, are you supposed to restore the relationship too?

Forgiveness is not the same thing as getting the old relationship back

This is the part of Brooke's story I find more interesting than deciding which Hogan was right about every old argument.

People often talk about forgiveness as if it is a reset button. Hurt happened. Forgiveness happened. Therefore the relationship should return to its previous setting.

Real relationships are not software.

You can release some of the anger and still know that trust changed. You can love a parent and need distance from the family dynamic around them. You can remember being protected by someone and also tell the truth about the moment you no longer felt the same way with them.

Brooke's public account does not prove a universal rule about forgiveness. It does give a very clear example of something many families struggle to name: forgiveness can be real even when reconciliation is incomplete.

CWM already has a deeper guide that asks this question directly: can you forgive without trusting again? The recovery context there is different from Brooke Hogan's family story, but the distinction between forgiveness, trust and access is the same one her comments bring into view.

Go Deeper

Forgiveness in Recovery: Can You Forgive Without Trusting Again?
This is the closest Evergreen answer to the question Brooke's story raises. The page currently has no approved featured image, so I am keeping it as a contextual text link rather than faking a visual card.

Sources

• Us Weekly — Brooke Hogan on her relationship with Hulk Hogan, September 24, 2026
• E! News — Brooke Hogan on forgiveness and estrangement, September 24, 2026
• TMZ — Brooke Hogan on “Goes Around,” September 24, 2026
• Reddit public discussion — r/WCW, September 2026

Featured image: Brooke Hogan with Hulk Hogan and family in 2007, photographed by Travis Isaacs, licensed CC BY 2.0. The Flickr image was license-reviewed by Wikimedia Commons. This is an archival image and does not depict the 2026 interview or the events discussed in it.