Yanking organs out of bloodied animal carcasses and tearing them apart with his teeth; gnawing bull testes around the dinner table with his family as if sharing a pot roast: Brian Johnson’s online stunts quickly made him a viral sensation. In 2021 Johnson, the self-titled “Liver King,” amassed 6 million followers and launched a supplements brand with a $100 million annual turnover—all thanks to his promises that with just a few pills, raw organ consumption, and intense fitness challenges, anyone could achieve his ultra-ripped physique. It—he—was 100% natural, he insisted over and over. Until the tail end of 2022, when leaked emails revealed that he had been injecting steroids and human growth hormone (HGH) to the tune of $11,000 a month.
The news, which drew the ire of even Joe Rogan, might have burst his multimillion-dollar bubble. But in a world where health misinformation can make its purveyors into stars—and wealthy ones, at that—retribution is often brief. Now, the Liver King is the subject of an installment of Untold, Netflix’s ongoing sports documentary anthology, streaming beginning May 13: 70 unadulterated minutes of his self-proclaimed underdog story, and path to redemption.
“I think he’s a marketing genius, I really do,” says director Joe Pearlman, whose previous film subjects include Robbie Williams, Lewis Capaldi, and the cast of Harry Potter. “The guy just knows what an audience wants and how to sell stuff to an audience in every sense.”
Read more: Here’s What’s New on Netflix in May 2025
Johnson, who at 48 is almost 200 lbs. of Texan sun-beaten muscle and sinew, says in the documentary that he spent his childhood feeling like a “runt.” Following the death of his father when he was a toddler, he grew up idolizing Rambo and Conan the Barbarian, realizing in his teens that working out would give him an instant community—and a way to change the physical appearance he believed was holding him back. The power of fitness was so strong, he says in the film, that his first-ever orgasm occurred on a bench press. A claim that might be quite remarkable had a near-identical one not been made by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1977’s Pumping Iron.
No matter: his tale of transformation and caveman-inspired lifestyle was compelling audiences. Add to that another backstory—that his sons Rad and Stryker suffered persistent poor health during their childhoods (“they were weak”), and that switching to an organ-heavy diet had cured their ills—and some 25,000 people began buying his liver supplements each month.
“I used to hate my f-cking life,” Johnson admits, “and now I’ve made my f-cking fortune.” That wasn’t enough, though—nor was the huge ranch lined with guns and furs (including over his bed); or the gym where even the dogs have their own treadmills. With the help of his wife, Barbara, and now-teenagers—who post online as “Liver Boy Rad” and “Stryker the Barbarian” (in one video they down their 15 daily raw egg yolks: “disgusting, but very ancestral”)—the brand was becoming further entrenched. Johnson appeared on chart-leading podcasts helmed by the likes of Logan Paul, Ethan Klein, and Bert Kreischer; he was all over social media feeds, including Pearlman’s.
As his star grew, so did an inevitable question: could his cartoon-like figure really have been achieved without chemical help? Johnson, prone to appearing on camera shirtless, was entirely “natty,” he said time and again, trashing theories from the likes of Rogan and continuing to promote the “nine ancestral tenets” that had made him into a multimillion-dollar modern-day Neanderthal. They were simple enough for anyone to follow, he urged: sleep, eat, move, shield (avoid excessive exposure to WiFi and electromagnetic fields), connect, cold, sun, fight (embrace physical and mental challenges), and bond. The raw organ-chomping, which carries risks including hepatitis E and salmonella, clearly worked, he said: just look at him.
Then came the email and blood test leak, shared on the channel of a fitness YouTuber who had been accusing Johnson of steroid use, in November 2022. “There was no denying that, man,” Johnson tells the documentary crew. “I knew he got me.” His wife (who posts, as you might expect, as “the Liver Queen”) insisted he stay quiet, and Johnson agreed: “I said, who f-cking cares… what kind of harm did I really f-cking do?”
Within three days, however, he realized he had no choice but to embark on damage control, posting a video (featuring the usual trademarks of opening with a call to his “Primals,” and sitting on a throne), admitting that he had lied.
Read more: 13 Remarkable Sports Documentaries to Stream Right Now
“I never expected this exposure in the public eye, and it’s been tricky as f-ck to navigate,” he said (in the documentary, he admits to filming segments 100 times over to get the perfect shot, and leaving videos replaying on loop to rack up viewing figures). His whole reason for being was simply “an experiment to spread the message” around young men’s mental health, the same journey he had been on as a result of finding fitness. His sign-off came with a promise: “I will be better starting immediately.” What followed was a retreat from social media, and a $25 million lawsuit from customers accusing him of fraud and deception (the case was ultimately dropped).
Three years on, is he really sorry?
The first time he met Johnson, Pearlman says he was “the man I saw online. It was full on, it was performative, it was outrageous,” he tells TIME of his visit to Johnson’s ranch last year. “He was trying to shock at every turn: we were constantly on our toes with what was going to happen next.” The stunts for the benefit of the team included his family running after a bull, killing it and then ripping out its organs to eat; and pulling a truck by a chain around his waist (which, it turned out, his team was pushing from behind).
By the second of the crew’s three trips, “He started to reveal a different side to him, a side that I don’t think we’d seen before.” The on-camera remorse is less about preserving his business, Pearlman, 37, thinks, than the fact that “he just wants to be liked. He wants to be loved, he wants attention. He craves it.”
Around three-quarters of the way through shooting, it became clear that “he was looking for some sort of reinvention. Whether he delivered that or I allowed him to deliver that onscreen is a different conversation. But I think that was the intention for sure.”
Here, Pearlman nails the unspoken tension at the heart of Untold: The Liver King: Why give an admitted liar, whose spurious health claims could have harmed millions, more exposure? “As far as I’m concerned, as a documentary-maker, I made a cautionary tale about what can and can’t happen to someone who is enigmatically selling ideas that people want to buy into. That’s dangerous,” Pearlman says. “There’s a big f-cking warning sign on this film saying, do not follow the people who talk like this.”
Pearlman thinks that Johnson’s bombast and bizarre stunts are incriminating enough without the need for the documentary to call him out explicitly. But the fact is that his posts have made him rich; that the young boys Johnson says he so badly wants to help are among those most vulnerable to devouring his misinformation as gospel. (A European Parliament Youth Survey published last year showed that 42% of 16-30-year-olds got their news from social media, with 76% encountering misleading information online within a week of the study taking place.) Those who grew up before the social media age might find it easier to dismiss his egregious claims, but many fear that younger generations will only continue to get sucked in.
“How do I repent?,” Johnson mulls in the film. “I don’t know what comes next. I don’t have the answer to that yet.” Six months later, though, inspiration appears to have struck: he says he plans to open precisely 302 retreats that espouse ancestral living. There are more mea culpas, for good measure. “I want the world to know that I was wrong… I got all of it wrong,” he says by the film’s end, in between thanking a homegrown strawberry for nourishing him, and simulating a baptism.
It’s hard not to watch this Damascene moment with skepticism, not least when minutes earlier Johnson has admitted to a criminal past including illegally printing money, and international drug trading. “There were a lot more things that didn’t make the cut,” says Pearlman. It is a crying shame that so many of these late-documentary revelations go without proper interrogation.
Instead, we are left with Johnson as the unreliable narrator of his own fairytale. “Ninety nine percent of the f-cking truth is what I would suggest to you that I’ve shared,” he insists in Untold. His words smack of more raw bull than his testicle dinner.
The post Untold: The Liver King Lets the Disgraced Health Influencer Off Easy appeared first on TIME.
