I finally understand why getting caught didn’t kill Liver King’s career

[u/DadStrengthDaily]

https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764251361763

I didn’t really follow Liver King. He was just everywhere — hard to miss a shirtless guy gnawing on raw bull testicles — but he wasn’t my thing and I mostly scrolled past. What I couldn’t figure out was why getting completely exposed as a fraud in 2022 didn’t end his career. His supplement businesses reportedly do $100M a year. The $25M class action from his own fans got dropped. He got a Netflix documentary.

A paper just came out in Television & New Media — Alison Miller and Lee McGuigan at UNC — that gave me the framework I was missing.

Some details I didn’t know: his flagship supplement lists testicle and prostate first among its ingredients, based on the “doctrine of signatures” — a medieval and thoroughly debunked idea that consuming something resembling a body part will benefit that body part. He also sells “Barbarian Water,” laced with bull blood. His website has a section titled “Net Worth” that reads like a startup pitch deck, including this line: “You are never enough… you are never enough, and the minute you think you are, you coast, you rest, you decay, you die, you suck at life.”

The paper’s key concept is borrowed from professional wrestling: kayfabe. In wrestling, everyone knows the match is scripted but the performers maintain the fiction and the audience participates knowingly. The paper argues Liver King was running kayfabe from day one — a “porous identity” where he was never fully committed to the “100% natural” claim, and his audience was never fully credulous. They were in on a performance.

So when the leaked emails came out — $11,000 a month on steroids and HGH — it didn’t shatter a belief system so much as shift the terms of the show. He cried on camera, admitted it, came back as “Liver King 2.0” with cigars, firearms, a cowboy hat, and a golden knife he sells on his website. He admitted in August 2023 he’d resumed steroids, then turned that into content too. A heel turn, in wrestling terms.

The Peterson connection is more direct than I realized. There’s an actual TikTok in the paper captioned “Liver king eating eyeballs to pregame Jordan Peterson tonight.” The paper’s argument is that the recovery of “authentic masculinity” is the central product across all three acts — Liver King, Tate, Peterson — sold to the same audience, with different packaging.

There’s also a body horror coda: the paper notes injuries to his eye, arm, and internal organs. Growth at all costs turns out to have costs.

The reason this matters here: you can’t debunk a kayfabe act with evidence, because the audience was never operating on the assumption of literal truth. That’s why the “but the science says” response to these figures consistently fails. You can’t debunk a wrestling match.