Wellness guru Wim Hof blasts ‘abuser’ accusations as vindictive and baseless character assassination

As the world’s most famous endurance enthusiast, Wim Hof has been exposed to some of the toughest conditions on the planet. 

Take the time, for example, his eyeballs froze over while he set a world record for swimming under ice. Or the freezing Arctic half-marathon he ran barefoot wearing just shorts.

But not even his strenuous ‘Wim Hof Method’ breathing exercises could have prepared TV’s eccentric Iceman for the tumultuous events of the past week.

Last weekend an article in a Dutch newspaper saw Hof’s former partner Caroline Hak accuse the 65-year-old of abusing her during their decade-long relationship, which ended in 2011, and branding him a ‘mean drunk’ and an ‘explosive character’.

Most damaging were her claims that the wellness guru assaulted her while she was pregnant with their child and that, after they split, he was banned from seeing the boy after the Dutch Child Welfare Council found he’d caused him ‘psychological’ damage.

Caroline, 65, also accuses him of attacking her son from a previous marriage. 

While Wim has admitted that this was not a healthy or happy period in his life, he denies her claims and categorically insists he is ‘not a violent man’.

‘This is all very wrong,’ he told The Mail on Sunday this week in an exclusive interview alongside his four adult children from his first marriage, who are all standing by him. Speaking via video call from Queensland, Australia, where he lives with his partner Erin, who in two weeks’ time is due to give birth to their second child, Wim adds:

‘I’m like a rock on the seashore. I stay strong because I’ve got my faith but this is too much.

‘I have a lot of mixed emotions about these false accusations. This is a character assassination.’

Over the past decade, Wim’s reputation has spread around the world thanks to his love of ice baths and his belief that pushing the human body to endure the cold has widespread mental and physical benefits. His philosophy has also made him immensely wealthy.

His book, The Wim Hof Method, has been translated into 44 languages and fans include Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon and Orlando Bloom.

In 2022, he was the star of BBC reality show Freeze The Fear With Wim Hof, presented by Holly Willoughby and Lee Mack. According to public records, his company Hof Holdings made more than €6 million (£5 million) profit that year.

Wim refutes Caroline’s claims that he slapped her, dragged her by her hair and tried to kick her in the belly when she was three months’ pregnant with their son Noah, while admitting there were ‘disagreements’ between them.

Instead, he accuses Caroline, whom he hasn’t seen for 11 years, of being ‘manipulative, bossy and controlling’ and of brainwashing and alienating Noah from him in the years that followed their split.

His children claim she has a ‘dark and manipulative side’ and allege she committed ‘psychological violence’ against their father leaving scars that endure to this day.

As to the allegation that in 2010 he attacked Caroline’s then 18-year-old son Christiaan, Wim insists it was nothing more than ‘a wrestling incident’ between ‘two grown men’.

He says he cannot recall Christiaan suffering a bloody nose or a black eye, as Caroline claims, but adds: ‘You know, when you are wrestling, a thing like that can happen. They made a whole lot out of it. It was very one-sided.’

However, the offence was serious enough to involve the authorities and he admits he paid a €350 fine, did 40 hours’ community service and received a two-week restraining order in 2012. Wim says he also immediately apologised to Christiaan who later asked for and received €2,000 towards a laptop for his college studies.

Over the following year, Wim says, he and Caroline continued to see each other: ‘I never heard anything more about it until this one-sided story came out this week.’

Her claims are potentially very damaging to Wim and his multi-million pound wellbeing empire.

Caroline said she spoke out because a film is being made about Wim, starring Joseph Fiennes in the lead role, and she didn’t want his background soft-soaped.

The project has temporarily been put ‘on hold’, although Wim tells me it was already on ice, as it were, after internal disagreements within Genesius Pictures over the script.

He says he intends to take legal action for defamation and slander. Wim’s children from his first marriage – Enahm, Isabelle, Laura and Michael – who all work for their father, want to set the record straight about what they witnessed as teenagers during Wim and Caroline’s ill-fated relationship, when they lived in Amsterdam.

While theirs was clearly a dysfunctional upbringing, they say they never saw their father become violent.

But Laura, 37, and a Wim Hof instructor herself, says Caroline slapped her face, verbally abused her and pulled her hair when Laura told her it was wrong for her to have another baby with so many children already in the house – claims which Caroline has said she does not recognise.

‘This woman caused us so much harm and for a long time afterwards I suffered psychological damage from it,’ says Laura.

Her 39-year-old sister Isabelle adds: ‘There are two sides to every story. All we have seen are false accusations and non-proven evidence. Those ten years were not happy years. We suffered as well.

‘But Caroline is just as much to blame for what happened in that toxic relationship as Wim.’ Wim and Caroline first met in 1996 – a year after his Spanish wife Olaya died – when he was organising tree climbing events for children. Caroline, already married, hired him for her son’s birthday. Over the next few years, she hired him again. After her divorce, they began a relationship in 2001. 

‘Caroline was a charming woman, beautiful,’ recalls Wim. Olaya, who had schizophrenia, had tragically taken her own life, leaving him and their children then aged just 12, ten, eight and six. The Hof siblings paint a picture of a traumatic childhood.

One evening, their mother kissed and tucked them up in bed at an eighth-floor apartment she owned in Spain and then, in the middle of the night, took her own life by jumping from the balcony. Wim says the family were still ‘dislocated’ and ’emotionally vulnerable’ when he and Caroline got together five years later.

When their gas and ­electricity was cut off because he’d been unable to pay the bill, she invited him and his children to move in with her. Not surprisingly, given their money issues and bringing up six children, tensions escalated.

At first there were trivial incidents. Enahm, 41, recalls being told by his father not to drink milk straight from the carton because ‘such actions caused intense tensions for Caroline’.

Isabelle claims Caroline accused her sister Laura of pushing her daughter over when, in fact, she had tripped over a pair of shoes.

The siblings recall being upset when Caroline claimed she saw their mother floating above her bed in her dreams. The youngest, Michael, now 36, speaks of ‘a hostile and poisonous environment’.

Enahm, 18, moved out within days. Isabelle, 16, left a couple of months later, after which Laura,14, says she was kicked out. Michael, 12, stayed for nine months before joining his siblings who were living with Enahm under the radar of local authorities.

This is the most troubling part of Wim’s story and does not paint him in a good light. While, at first, he went to visit his children in their dilapidated home, he remained living with Caroline who by 2002 was pregnant with their son Noah. When he could, he gave them money but what followed was a ten-year period when he had little contact with his four children.

‘It was one of the big mistakes of my life,’ he says now. The siblings have challenged their father over his failure to stand up for them and look after them but ultimately have forgiven him. It is clear the family are now close.

But, while Caroline has accused Wim of being a bad father, they say that she separated him from them and also prevented them from having a relationship with their younger half-brother, Noah.

‘She didn’t want our father to see us any more,’ says Enahm. ‘I’d phone, to ask her to get him to call and she’d say: ‘No. Your father makes his own decisions.’

‘Our father is a pure and loving person at heart and she took advantage of that, inflicting psychological abuse on him. What I saw was that she was the one controlling the situation. She wanted to keep him for herself. He suffered for years after the relationship ended.’

Laura adds: ‘He was always there for us, giving us everything he had: time, attention and love, until Caroline came into the ­picture. Everything changed. She emotionally dominated my father. He was a broken man.

‘Once this woman, who made everything impossible, was no longer in our lives, we could rebuild a bond with our father. The mistakes my father made, I forgave because of the bond we shared.’

Last week, Caroline said that at 42, she wasn’t keen on having another child and had felt ‘cornered’ when she became pregnant early in 2002 with Noah. Wim tells me that, as far as he is concerned, Noah was ‘born out of love’.

One who saw their relationship close up in the years that followed was British TV producer Luke Campbell who filmed one of the first documentaries about Wim for Channel 4 in 2009 as he prepared to run his Arctic half-marathon.

‘They were both very strong characters,’ says Campbell, who spent days with the pair both in Finland and at a farmhouse in Poland where Caroline was planning to set up a charity for young teenagers caught up in the sex trade in Amsterdam.

‘She was a pretty forceful lady and I think Wim was probably a chaotic figure to have to live with,’ says Campbell. ‘They did get heated at times but I never saw any aggression, just two strong personalities facing pressures they’d brought on themselves in pursuit of their own goals in life.

‘They were living a challenging existence. I think money was tight but they seemed well matched. It didn’t feel dysfunctional.’

Both, says Campbell, appeared to dote on Noah, then six years old. And yet, in 2015, the Dutch Child Welfare Council concluded that Hof had forfeited his right to parental access. According to the dossier in the Dutch newspaper, this was because he had committed ‘psychological violence against his son’, now 21 and a rising ballet star with the Bayerisches Staatsballett in Munich.

Wim says: ‘He was manipulated by his mother in a way that meant I couldn’t see him any more.’

He denies saying that ballet was ‘for gays’ – a claim Noah made to child welfare – and says he contributed €25,000 (£21,000) towards Noah’s ballet school fees. ‘I am proud of what Noah has achieved. I hope one day I will see him perform. He’s my son and I love him.’

Dutch journalists at de Volkskrant newspaper say they have seen documents supporting Caroline’s claims: a medical report, a police report and child welfare reports.

Meanwhile, Wim and his children are incensed that their own account was ignored by the publication, while ‘malicious’ claims made by one of Wim’s estranged brothers who has a fraud conviction, were included in the piece.

The worst of these, says Wim, is the claim that he was violent towards his first wife, Olaya. ‘She was the love of my life,’ he says of the woman he met when she was an 18-year-old student.

For her part, Caroline stands by her story. Her spokesman told The Mail on Sunday: ‘She would like to emphasise that Mr Hof’s eldest children, except for a few weeks, were not living with her and Mr Hof during the relationship and have no first-hand knowledge of what happened between Mr Hof and herself during that time.

‘Caroline does not recognise any of the allegations that Mr Hof’s eldest children (who as far as she knows, all work for their father’s company) make against her.’

Amid all these claims and counter-claims, what is clear is that Wim’s relationship with Caroline was highly troubled and continues to have repercussions. It also gives a new, extraordinary insight into the forces which drive him to push himself to death-defying limits.

While he and his lawyers are preparing to take legal action, he says he is focusing on the arrival of his seventh child, a baby girl who will be a sister for the six-year-old son, Eden, he shares with Erin, 36.

He loves Queensland’s ‘amazing sun’ but any suggestion that he has gone soft would be misplaced. Hof still begins each day by practising his breathing technique before climbing into a freezer.

‘I want to bring happiness, strength and health to the world, not hate and despair,’ he says.

Ultimately, he says, he is seeking peace. Whether or not he gets it is another matter.