Liver King Arrested After Challenging Joe Rogan to a Fight
Brian “The Liver King” Johnson said that he wanted to step into the octagon with Joe Rogan. Now, he’s in police custody for making “terroristic threats.”
Before this week, Johnson was best known for being a concerningly muscle-bound fitness influencer and supplement seller who swore by his steady diet of raw meat and animal organs before admitting to using various steroids and performance-enhancing drugs to achieve his startling physique. Now, unfortunately for the Liver King and his disciples, there is a very real possibility that Johnson’s legacy will forever be defined as “the terrorist who tried to fight Joe Rogan,” after his spree of erratic behavior and posting ended with a criminal charge yesterday evening.
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One day after Johnson issued a challenge to Rogan in a bizarre Instagram video, police in Austin, Texas arrested the subject of the Netflix documentary Untold: The Liver King and charged him with Terroristic Threats, a Class B misdemeanor.
In the statement to local NBC affiliate KXAN, Austin police confirmed that Johnson “made threats against Joe Rogan on his Instagram profile.” Before bringing Johnson in, “detectives contacted Mr. Rogan, who stated he had never had any interaction with Johnson and considered the posts to be threatening.” The police arrested Johnson outside the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Austin shortly afterwards.
In the video that led to Johnson's arrest, the visibly agitated influencer ranted, “Joe Rogan, I’m calling you out, my name’s Liver King. Man to man, I’m picking a fight with you. I have no training in jiu-jitsu; you’re a black belt, you should dismantle me. But I’m picking a fight with you. Your rules, I’ll come to you, whenever you’re ready.”
While Rogan is familiar with this kind of posturing from his involvement in professional mixed martial arts, the Joe Rogan Experience host apparently found the strange video and Johnson’s visibly disturbed state to be ample cause for intervention from law enforcement officials.
Although Rogan and Johnson have never met face-to-face, the two had an acrimonious history leading up to the arrest, as Rogan was one of Johnson’s most vocal mockers and critics back when The Liver King still claimed that he achieved his fitness goals through completely natural means. Rogan correctly and publicly assumed that Johnson was lying about not using steroids, and, in Untold: The Liver King, Johnson appeared to blame Rogan for the unravelling of his social media empire.
Austin police say the investigation into Johnson’s threats is ongoing.
