During his appearance on the “True Geordie Podcast,” Paul, 27, revealed that his publicist, who also represented Johnson, 50, called him in the aftermath of the Aokigahara incident and said that the former WWE wrestler wanted Paul to remove all of his videos and pictures of them from his social media.
“This was one of the saddest moments of my life, what I’m about to say,” Paul said. “After Japan happened, I obviously found myself in a hole – rightfully so – that I had never been in before. Extremely low, mentally, and I got a call from my publicist, who also repped Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.”
“She’s like, ‘Hey, Dwayne has asked that you remove every video and picture that you’ve done with him. Maybe in the future the relationship can be reconciled, but for now, he basically wants nothing to do with you,’” Paul continued. “Which I also understood. I get it. I made a grotesque error.”
Before being embroiled in the controversy, the two had appeared in several viral videos together, including one where Paul visits Johnson on the set of the 2017 movie “Baywatch.”
Their relationship purportedly turned sideways in 2018 after Paul went to Japan’s Aokigahara forest, also known as the “suicide forest,” on the slopes of Mt. Fuji in December 2017.
While filming a vlog, Paul and his crew saw the body of a suicide victim. Instead of immediately calling the authorities, the vlogger and his team focused their camera on the corpse and posted the video on YouTube.
The video, titled “We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest…,” was eventually taken down, and Paul issued an apology video amid the backlash. Over four years after the incident, Paul admitted to Ariel Helwani of “The MMA Hour” that his apology video was “half-ass.”
Regarding his relationship with Johnson after the controversy, Paul shared, “I feel like we had a healthy relationship, an open line of communication. I was so sad that my hero wanted nothing to do with me.”
“I was sad because I understood it. I really f*cked up,” he added.
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