The name of Brooke Hogan’s infant daughter is a tribute to her late father Hulk, despite their yearslong estrangement.
Insiders told TMZ on Friday that the “Hogan Knows Best” star, 37, and husband Steven Oleksy named their daughter Molly Gene, with Gene being the same middle name of the wrestling legend, who died on Thursday at 71 from what’s believed to have been cardiac arrest.
Brooke and her husband, a former pro hockey player, welcomed Molly and her twin brother, Oliver Andrew, in January.
Two months later, Brooke’s mother, Linda Hogan, posted a tearful video online in which she claimed Brooke had stopped speaking to the family eight years prior, going on to get married and welcome twins without telling them.
Brooke, the oldest child of the WWE Hall of Famer and his first wife, has long had issues with her family. Following Linda’s video, she publicly confirmed she’d made the difficult decision to cut off contact with her parents, accusing them of lies, manipulation and years of verbal and physical abuse, all while benefitting financially off her “suffering and embarrassment.”
“I have been asked to defend poor behavior to the public and have done so out of love,” she wrote on Instagram at the time, while remaining deliberately vague in the details of her allegations. She said she had given her parents countless chances to repair their relationships, only for her to be “disrespected again and again.”
“I so badly wanted to see the good in them,” Brooke said. “[But] each individual, on their own, has given me more than enough reasons over the years to make this extremely hard and painful decision to end contact.”
Still, sources say Brooke was “always a daddy’s girl” and felt the desire to honor her father by giving her daughter his middle name.
Sources previously told TMZ that Brooke last spoke to her father in September 2023, shortly before he wed Sky Daily and nearly two years before his death.
Despite their fractured relationship, Brooke reportedly expressed love for her dad during that final conversation, and worried he was working too hard amid his declining health.
Daily on Friday revealed that her husband had been dealing with some unspecified health issues leading up his death, but that she had expected him to “overcome them.”
Hogan’s death came roughly a month after radio host Bubba the Love Sponge said that he’d heard Hulk had been hospitalized and “might not make it.” Hours later, a source told Us Weekly that he’d undergone a serious heart surgery but was “doing well” and was not “on death’s door.”
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