Wrestling the Hulk

by Linda Hogan

  With Terry’s behavior on New Year’s Eve along with all that was happening in our private life I couldn’t help but begin to think that Terry was having an affair. Again? All the signs were staring me directly in the face. Is it Christiane? I wondered. Was it her makeup on the pillow? Was the reason Brooke’s door wasn’t locked at night because Christiane was sneaking out to see Terry? Was the reason Christiane didn’t have plans on New Year’s Eve because her boyfriend had a family—us?

  I had my suspicions, but no proof. That night when we got home from the Forge, I asked Brooke if she thought Terry was having an affair with Christiane. “No, I totally trust her,” Brooke said, reassuring me. “She’s my best friend. There’s no way.”

  I thought Christiane liked me. Obviously she liked my husband more! Christiane was a good shoulder for him to cry on. She was also younger and fresher than I was. And if our marriage was going to fail, she assumed that she would be the next in line, I guess. Looking at the resources we had, Christiane knew she could possibly hit the jackpot!

  Sign Language

  When a man is good-looking, rich, powerful, famous, and . . . thinks the grass is greener on the other side, this is a recipe for disaster in any marriage. A man who is more in demand, especially one who says he’s not happy at home, is more likely to cheat. Women throw themselves at men who are in the public eye, and it’s almost too easy for them to stray. Also, highly successful men are used to taking risks. They get an adrenaline rush from the excitement when they are risking it all, including their marriage. This rush becomes addictive. They view love as a game and want to keep it exciting at all times, and it’s happening a lot now. Single women pursuing these men, luring them, thinking nothing of the kids or the outcome for them. The temptation for men is too hard to resist, especially when a woman makes it her mission in life to be with a married man.

  I know this type of man. I was married to one for almost twenty-four years.

  If your husband is always distracted, distant, and mentally not present or aware, you might want to look at him more closely. I use “present” and “aware” because those are words that Terry now has tattooed on his wrists. I believe he realized that he should have been more present and aware during our marriage. During the end of our marriage, he always made me feel like I was the one who was falling apart. He said that I cussed too much, I drank too much, I was too fat, didn’t work out enough, and so on. I think he would strategically pick me apart, so I would have low self-esteem. It was a typical attempt to throw me off guard. I even noticed that he seemed bored with our family. He didn’t want to plan any vacations or anything in the future. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t even answer that. I’m taking it one day at a time.”

  If you think your husband is cheating, there are signs—a different type of sign language. Take the following signs at face value because they’re pretty much classic telltale symptoms of cheating. And don’t be afraid. Open your eyes to them because you deserve to know the truth.

  • Your husband has a sudden increase in time spent away from home.

  • He has decreased sexual interest in you.

  • He leaves the house or goes to another room to talk on his cell phone, blaming it on background noise, lack of reception, and so on.

  • He sits inside of his car upon arrival at the home and talks on his phone for five more minutes. He knows he can’t finish that call inside in front of his family.

  • He asks about your schedule more often than usual. He wants to know where you are going, but then is noncommittal when you try to pin him down to a schedule.

  • He has more cash on him than normal without any accountability.

  • He tries not to get to close to you because he smells like another woman’s perfume.

  • When he answers the phone in front of you, he gets a lot of “wrong numbers.”

  • He makes frequent trips to the store and has lots of late business meetings.

  • His friends cover for him and his whereabouts.

  • He sleeps in a separate bedroom or on the sofa.

  • He doesn’t make any eye contact when talking with you.

  • He has constant mood swings and is always short with you.

  • He makes you feel like you’re the one who is falling apart.

  If you think your husband is cheating, don’t make accusations. This will only make him take being sneaky to the next level. He will hide the affair to throw you off the scented trail. Seek the advice of a private investigator. As I talk about things like a private investigator, it hits me as being surreal. I never dreamed that I would have to have my husband followed.

  Some women turn a blind eye or they actually cheat on their husbands to get back at them. I wasn’t capable of having a sexual relationship with another man while I was married. I didn’t have time to have girlfriends, let alone a guy I could be sneaking away with. First of all, it was wrong; and even if it had been convenient or the opportunity had presented itself, I still wouldn’t have acted on it. No matter how bad my marriage got, I’m not of that fiber. It takes strength of character and an ability to honor a commitment! My opinion of women who cheat with married men is that they are selfish and careless, and they are homewreckers. My first priority was keeping my family together and keeping my children happy.

  If you are ever considering cheating on a spouse, stop and think about the consequences. It’s a gamble. Think about everything you’ve worked for—your home, cars, savings accounts, everything monetary—and then think about everyone who loves and respects you—your children, parents, friends, the people you love—and be willing to put it all down on a gaming table where you can lose it all in just one move. Why would you risk everything? Who out there besides your family is worth that kind of risk? Is a ten-second orgasm really worth it? It is selfish and destructive to everyone involved, and if you’re the one who is guilty, you’re going to have to live with that choice forever. You’re going to have to look in the mirror at the guilty face staring back and figure out how to live with your lie. I could never take a risk like that. But in the end I had to deal with the results of someone else doing that to me. It was painful and life-changing.

  Chapter Ten

  The Liar’s Den

  FROM JANUARY THROUGH JUNE 2007 WE SHOT season three of Hogan Knows Best. It was the final season of our show, but we didn’t know it when we began production at the beginning of that year. While most shows get canceled by the network due to low ratings, we had a different ending. The ratings were there. The family unity was gone.

  It was clear to me that Terry was living a double life. I just didn’t know with whom or how to know for sure. I was terrified of getting caught if I followed him or snooped through his stuff. So, I relied on the age old line “Time will tell!”

  One of the episodes that we did toward the end of the season was a scene between Terry and me at a marriage counselor’s office. Here is a diary entry that gives some insight into how I was feeling before going to marriage counseling:

  It’s been as stressful as I can ever remember! I am trying to hold it together, but I am so close to giving up on everything. We have no fun, no lifestyle or even a calm friendly conversation. We’re just going through the motions. We don’t even talk; it’s bitching, whining, complaining, tiredness, soreness, or arguing. I can’t wait to finish filming Season 3 and get through this last season, just to get away! I’m sick of all the BS. I want to move out of this monster Miami house, regain my composure, and move to Cali! Try to regain a life together again!

  Terry and I had never been to a marriage counselor before even though friends and family members had suggested it to us over the years. I had even brought up the idea to Terry again. But he didn’t see how it could help our situation. He couldn’t wrap his head around the thought of somebody who was so removed from the entertainment business and wrestling giving us advice on how to fix our life
. He felt strongly that if they didn’t understand that integral part of our lives, then they could never understand us or our problems. He also didn’t trust them not to run to the tabloids with our personal and private details. I just felt trapped. While we were shooting in Miami our relationship was always up and down. There was never any continuity. Terry and I would get along. Then we would fight. We would get along. Then we would fight. I thought it was because we had so much stuff going on in our life with cameras, kids, and stress. Not getting along seemed par for the course. I didn’t analyze it any deeper than that. He’d be sad, then happy. I never knew if it was genuine or not.

  The producers of our reality show felt that all married couples who have been together this long fight, come back together, and then fight again. They felt it was common in most marriages, so maybe we should go to marriage counseling on the show.

  Through the course of that week when we were shooting in the marriage counselor’s office, they basically wanted to peel back the skin of our relationship and ask some pretty personal questions. If we had been in a counseling session with no cameras rolling, I would have welcomed answering the tough questions. I wouldn’t have held back at all because who knows? It might have made things better between us. However, this was being done for national TV, and I wasn’t ready to rip the lid off our personal problems.

  At the end of the week, Terry started getting serious with the sessions. He was shooting darts, but I wasn’t firing back. I was acting as though this was going in one ear and out the other, but underneath it all it was making me feel very uncomfortable. When the cameras were off, Terry and I began to fight about what was discussed in the therapy sessions. While I thought that going to a marriage counselor might actually help, he took what was discussed to heart and copped an attitude about it. It derailed us and didn’t help us get any closer. I was mad that he would try to embarrass me in front of the crew, in front of the world!

  WE ENDED UP GOING TO THREE WEEKS OF MARRIAGE COUNSELING sessions. One of the exercises during the sessions was for us to write a poem to each other about how we felt. Looking back, and knowing what was really going on that whole year, how could Terry have meant the words of his poem in a genuine way? He didn’t. It was only something that made him look good on television. However, when Terry read the poem out loud to me, I was brought to tears. I thought that maybe we really had a tender moment. Maybe I had been misjudging him. It gave me a strand of hope. As always, he made me doubt my own feelings, my behavior, my attitude, and second-guess my thoughts and actions. That’s what control freaks do. They brainwash you. Here’s what he had written:

  The first time I saw you, I saw your feet [I wear a size 11] and then I saw you.

  Let’s have our first drink and then you might think, I am the one for you.

  You lied about your car, you didn’t know I was a star.

  So you left the bar and I had no idea you would go so far.

  In the end we would turn out to be more than just friends.

  So I did a knee bend, so we could stay together till the end.

  I love you too, so whatcha gonna do?

  After he read that poem, I began to think that maybe therapy could bring us together, be the jump start that we needed. Well, it turned out to be wishful thinking. Shortly after that episode, Terry went back to his old ways. This time, it was just blatant and more disrespectful than before. He was sleeping in another room every night. I begged him to sleep in our bed, but he told me that he liked the other bed better. He didn’t like the dogs being in bed with us. I even locked them in the laundry room, trying to make him happy. But he still didn’t sleep with me. So many excuses! And the baffling behavior didn’t end there. He made little or no eye contact with me. We barely had civilized conversations. When we would get ready in the morning to shoot the show, he would stare straight into the mirror and not even look at me. He even started using a separate bathroom, further separating us.

  Back then, if we had any sexual relations, it was mainly oral sex from me to him. He would lie there on his back lifeless and I’d do all the work. Most of the time he didn’t even want sex, probably because he was getting sex elsewhere and he was wiped out by the time he came home to me. But when he wanted sex, he wanted to try new things with me that I had never done with him before. Where did he learn that new trick? I wondered. He’d turn the TV on at bedtime and go directly to a premium channel—porn! He went to it like radar!

  It certainly wasn’t the first time we had watched porn together. He had put porn on every now and then in a hotel room. But this became a regular nightly thing. If I was tired and I wasn’t in the mood, Terry would get pissed off. He became angry if I wasn’t interested. And if it didn’t go his way, he would curse at me, stomp his feet, and go sleep in the other bedroom. The next morning, he would treat me badly if we didn’t have sex the night before. Is this all that our marriage has come to after so many years? I thought. What a heartless relationship this is becoming. Sure, sex is important in a marriage, but when we shut the last light off after a long day and got into bed, it would have been nice to have a little chitchat or at least go to bed together.

  Terry’s fanny pack was back around his waist at all times. In fact, the producers did an episode on Hogan Knows Best where they wanted to know what was inside Terry’s infamous fanny pack. Of course, he cleaned it out before they filmed it. Inside he only had toothpicks, business cards, and his wallet. How cute. Normally, he had two or three cell phones, pills out the ass, and a lot of cash!

  Toward that last part of filming we would go out to dinner or on the boat and Christiane was always with us. I thought she was there because she was Brooke’s friend, but it was really just convenient for Terry to hook up with her. I remember how he always manipulated me into thinking I was a crappy person! I drank too much, I cursed too much, I always left and drove to the other house or got on a plane and flew away. Honestly, I left because I was scared. We were in such abusive verbal fights. Sure, I would say, “Fuck off,” but I would never directly call him a dirty name. He called me a “dumb cunt!” This let me know that at this point he had no respect for me or our marriage.

  I think Terry had Christiane at his beck and call and it was to his benefit to pick a fight with me. He knew what buttons to push and how to piss me off. He also knew that I was the one who would always walk away and often leave for the weekend after an argument. If it was Friday and we were done filming, instead of spending a nice weekend together, he would pick a juicy fight with me. I wanted to be left alone and preferred spending the weekend with my animals as company, so I’d get in my car and go back to our old house. He knew that if he did certain things, I would leave and it would give him a free weekend. How he lived with his conscience, I will never know.

  Things were also taking a turn for the worse with Brooke’s music career and her relationship with her record label. It was clear that Terry wasn’t sticking up for Brooke, and he was more focused on his own deals with the label owner. An energy drink, online gaming, frozen food line, boxing promotions, a toy robot, a TV show, and more. Terry refused to speak to the label head about any glitches, because he didn’t want anything to upset that business rapport or any of his own deals. Terry was being such a jerk. I was puzzled by the changes that were going on with him.

  The label continued to treat Brooke poorly, and it became evident that they weren’t putting any marketing or promotion behind her upcoming album. I didn’t have a platform to speak, and Terry had monopolized the label owner and taken over that business relationship for his own gain. Brooke was trying to handle a lot of the business on her own, but her father was undermining her by putting his own deals first. At that point, I think Terry thought Brooke was just a fly in the ointment.

  As soon as Brooke and I confronted the label owner, and ruffled his feathers, Terry got angry with us. Now, it wasn’t just Terry and me at odds at home, but he and Brooke were arguing as well. Brooke came home one night, irate about the way the lab
el was handling her business. She told Terry how upset she was and about all the horrible things being said behind the scenes. She even told the label that she was going to quit.

  THE VERY NEXT NIGHT BROOKE WAS AT THE FORGE RESTAURANT eating and in walked Terry, the label owner, and Eric Bischoff. They were laughing and sat down to have drinks. She was amazed that her own father could be laughing and having drinks with her boss, when just the night before she broke down and told him about how hurt she was by what his label wasn’t doing to help her. Terry clearly wasn’t the least bit concerned that Brooke was at odds with this man. This behavior and his lack of loyalty to Brooke painted him in a different light to me, different than I had ever seen him before.

  That night, Brooke came home and wrote “liar” on the front door of our home. She didn’t want to speak to her dad and wanted to quit the record label. Brooke was in a frenzy, upset like I had never seen her upset before. I couldn’t believe that Terry could do this to his own daughter. He was acting blind to it all. He couldn’t have cared less if she was upset, because his business deals came first now.