Q & A with Brooke Hogan

NEW YORK - Her parents are in the middle of a tawdry divorce, her brother is in jail and she's cut off contact with her mom because of her mother's teenage boyfriend. It would seem that with all the drama engulfing Brooke Hogan these days, the last place she'd want to be is in front of the cameras.

But the statuesque starlet was eager to sign up for her own reality show, VH1's Brooke Knows Best, making its debut Sunday, despite - or perhaps because of - her family woes.

The Hogans had been depicted for four seasons on Hogan Knows Best (also on VH1) as Hulk Hogan's loving, tight-knit clan. But over the past year, the superstar wrestler, whose real name is Terry Bollea, and his wife, Linda, have had an acrimonious split, while their son Nick Bollea serves an eight-month sentence after pleading no contest to causing a crash that seriously injured his friend.

And if that weren't enough fodder for the tabloids, the romantic lives of Brooke's parents (he has a new girlfriend, she's dating a 19-year-old) have made them fixtures in the gossip pages and blogs.

Despite it all, Brooke, 19, has maintained the bubbly, wisecracking persona that she embodied on Hogan Knows Best. Dressed in a clingy red halter-top, long black gaucho pants and wearing her long blond hair in a ponytail, the striking Hogan (and budding pop star) talked about how she has been coping with the turmoil.

What made you want to do another reality show?

The first four times we did the reality show, I didn't have my stuff together with my music career. So this time, I'm like, all right, I have to start recording an album and using this TV show to my benefit, other than just letting these cameras come into my life to make ratings [laughs]. And plus, I have to admit I really do miss the guys when they're gone, because they're like built-in family now, all the cameramen and stuff. So it's like, "Ah, man, I really hate being followed all the time, but OK, come back. You guys are cute" [laughs].

Do you think the Hogan reality show helped tear your family apart?

I don't think a camera and a cameraman can destroy a family. I mean, they're not part of the family. But I think that it was the pressure of the cameras being there and the pressure of being on guard and not really being able to let your feelings fly, like if you are mad at somebody. Let's just say my parents were fighting; they couldn't just let it all out on national television. So I think it kind of suppressed it to the point where it almost let it explode, but I think that it would have come sooner or later.

Do you think the strain of your brother's problems played a role in your parents' breakup?

It takes two to tango, and it was my mom and dad, they had problems. And it's not the camera crew that tears it apart, it's not Nick's accident that tears it apart, it's just that those things add more stress so I think that to every cloud there's a silver lining, and I think that they almost saved my parents from their marriage going any farther down a destructive road.

How have you dealt with your brother not being around?

It's really, really hard because I feel like our whole lives I was able to protect him ... and now I had to watch him walk away in handcuffs and I couldn't do anything about it. It's hard because he's like my best friend. I mean, I have friends, but my brother is really the one person who I can confide in and talk to about anything. So it's tough because everything that we talk about now is recorded. And we saw what happened with that.

Source: http://www.baltimoresun.com

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