Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was Logan Paul’s role model for a long time.
So when they began working on Vines together, it was a dream come true for Paul. However, their relationship unraveled in 2017 after the podcaster uploaded a video of a suicide victim's body to YouTube.
He explained that falling out to John Cena, who was the latest guest on Paul’s Impaulsive podcast.
"You and Dwayne are two people I definitely looked up to, a lot, when I was trying to figure out the blueprint for my career that didn't exist,” Paul began at around the 1:23:20 hour mark. “Dwayne, especially. My idol. My hero. He's doing it to the highest degree. I wanted to be like Dwayne.”
"Eventually, in the same way I met you, I met Dwayne. He was just as cool in person as I thought he was on TV. He's awesome. We made content together. Went mega viral,” he continued, sharing that they were getting 50-70 million views. “I would have considered us acquaintances, at least. He was great.
"Then, Japan happened. I could go into so much depth about my remorse and the place I was in and the faults I made at that time of my life. I had to really re-wire my brain and backtrack and ask myself how I let that happen and what went wrong in my life where I thought that was okay. In that process, I did a lot of damage. It wasn't something that was on the forefront of my mind, and I've had to do a tremendous amount of therapy and figure out what in my life happened or didn't happen to where I did that."
"DJ was one of the people I hurt because of his mother's experience. That's his experience to tell, I'm not going to share. I hurt him. So much so that he basically wanted nothing to do with me, and rightfully so. I let down my hero."
In 2017, Paul faced major backlash when he shared a video of the corpse of a man in Japan's "suicide forest." He later took a step back from sharing content, tweeting in January 2018, "Taking time to reflect. No vlog for now. See you soon."
He also issued written and video apologies on X, but it seems those weren’t persuasive enough for The Rock, who ultimately asked that all the content they shot together be removed.
Paul has spoken about this before during an appearance on the True Geordie Podcast in 2022.
"I get it. I made a grotesque error and he has had things happen in his life where that incident has affected him in a vastly different way. So, I understood it. That was the other part," he said. "I just wish I would have got a call or text or something, because I thought we had a healthy relationship, an open line of communication. I was so sad my hero wanted nothing to do with me."
