Liver King Steroids: The Confession, the Verdict

The Verdict: Verified on the record. Liver King admitted everything — the steroids, the peptides, the pharmaceutical growth hormone, the monthly bill, the lie. This is the rare fake-natty case with a signed confession, and it's the perfect case study for how the modern natty lie is manufactured, marketed, and monetized.

Forty-eight hours before his empire almost collapsed, Brian Johnson — better known as Liver King — sat on a podcast and delivered the single most dishonest sentence in modern fitness: "The question has always been, 'Do you take steroids? Do you take PEDs?' The answer to that is no. I've always told the truth. I still tell the truth."

It was October 2022. By December 2, he was on camera, orating a confession titled "Liver King Confession... I Lied." The man who built a reported nine-figure supplement empire on raw liver, raw bull testicles, and the "nine ancestral tenets" admitted he'd been running pharmacological assistance the entire time.

Here is the full, verified story — because a documented confession like this is the closest thing the natty-or-not world ever gets to a signed court record.

The Confession, In His Own Words

The video that millions have now watched delivered the admission in a section that read like a eulogy for a persona:

> "Yes, I've done steroids. And yes, I am on steroids, monitored and managed by a trained hormone clinician."

The details he gave, on the record:

• 120mg of testosterone per week — a routine TRT dose he framed as "therapeutic," which it was, in the same way every bodybuilder-on-cruise swears the cruise is therapeutic.
• Peptide combinations to raise growth hormone that, he said, failed to move the needle.
• Pharmaceutical-grade growth hormone once the peptides didn't work — explicitly, on camera, in the same breath as the "ancestral living" pitch.
• A monthly spend the leaked documents put at roughly $11,000 on steroids and related medications — ABC News' coverage pegged the figure at about $16,400 Australian dollars a month at the time.
• And the rationale, which deserves to be quoted because it's the entire industry in one paragraph: "I convinced myself that this had nothing to do with the ancestral message... I convinced myself that this would be the wrong message to send to the 15-year-old boys."

The last sentence is the whole natty economy in microcosm: the product was a fantasy marketed at children, and the lie was justified by the fantasy.

The Leaked Emails (The Part He Couldn't Walk Back)

Liver King's confession wasn't voluntary in the way the video suggested. Days before, the analyst More Plates More Dates (Derek) published an hour-long exposé titled "The Liver King Lie" built on leaked emails and bloodwork. Derek's documentation showed Johnson's June 2021 communications with a clinic — a "medley" described as 16 vials a month, five of them steroids, one a synthetic protein hormone, alongside the $11,000-a-month figure Johnson himself allegedly referenced in the correspondence.

Then came the layer underneath the testimonials: the persona, Johnson later admitted, was premeditated. "Liver King, the public figure, was an experiment to spread the message" — a persona engineered to go viral, with the raw-organ diet as the hook and Ancestral Supplements as the checkout.

The confession video absorbed every one of those details and admitted them. For once in the genre's history, the fake natty is a fake natty by his own admission.

The Prior Denials (Also On the Record)

Before we give the confession credit, the record of what he said before needs to be quoted, because it's the textbook perfect pre-lie script:

• On Mark Bell's Power Project: "I don't touch the stuff. I've never done the stuff. Not going to do the stuff."
• Repeatedly on the influencer circuit: "Do you take PEDs? No. I've always told the truth."
• And the coup de grâce — his own YouTube, months before the leak: he demonstrated his "nasally administered" homemade "food-based" drops and swore by his all-natural protocol while the clinic invoices were already sitting in a reviewer's inbox.

The anatomy of the lie, in review: flat denial, persona-building deflection, and absolutely zero mention that the "primal physique" relied on the least-primal technology human beings have invented. It's the same playbook we break down in our Instagram Natty Lie guide — executed at ten times the scale.

The Post-Confession Sequel (LK 2.0 — Also Enhanced)

The wildest part of the Liver King story is that the "redemption arc" was also enhanced. In September 2023, Johnson's own website billed "LK 2.0": after 220 days of "primal natty savagery," he announced he was officially "back on a steroid and a low dose of therapeutic HGH" — again claimedly managed by his clinician. And in the same update, he dropped the detail that his earlier "nothing synthetic" claim was already wrong, because the HCG and Clomiphene he'd run from January to March had quietly stopped being mentioned, after his doctor clarified that those were, respectively, a peptide and a synthetic.

Read that update carefully, because it's the perfect capstone: the second iteration of the "clean" persona was also running a steroid, and his own medical team had to correct his natty claims about the interim. The Liver King lie regenerated like a lizard tail — same brand, same marketing, same enhanced physiology, new apartment.

And the money? The confession didn't stop the machine. Fortune reported the "ancestral" empire had been generating an estimated $100 million a year across his supplement brands — Heart & Soil and Ancestral Supplements — and the business didn't dissolve after the admission. A class-action-style legal action involving Johnson and other influencers was filed in 2023 and reported widely (Business Insider covered his expressions of regret around the $25 million lawsuit headline), further cementing the "verified liar" file. But the brands kept selling raw organ capsules at $30-65 a bottle to the same audience.

What the Liver King Case Really Proves

Every fake natty in this industry relies on the same assumption: the audience can't verify a physique on the internet. Blood tests belong to the athlete. Emails belong to the athlete. The camera only shows the final product. Liver King is the exception that validates the rule — a case where the documentation leaked, the confession landed, and the market still didn't blink.

Which tells you everything about the durability of the natty lie:

1. A signed confession doesn't break the brand. Liver King admitted, on camera, with receipts available, to running 120mg of test weekly, pharma GH, a $11,000 monthly chemistry bill, and a premeditated marketing persona. The empire kept selling.
2. The "therapeutic" reframe is bulletproof. Every compound was "monitored and managed by a trained hormone clinician" — the TRT-adjacent framing that lets an enhanced athlete pretend he's a patient. Compare that to how we've covered the same "TRT" angle in our honest-analyst take on steroids.
3. The audience wants the fantasy more than the truth. A teenage follower doesn't want to hear that the raw-liver god is actually a pharmaceutical client. The brand was better with the lie.

The Verdict, Restated

Verified enhanced — a confessed fake natty. Not alleged. Not debated. Confessed, documented, and re-confessed in the sequel. The Liver King case is the definitive modern example of how a natty claim is manufactured for market, and it's the one case in this entire celebrity series that doesn't need a single inference.

And yes — the products he ran on are the same class of tools we talk about honestly here. Growth hormone and peptides are real physiology with real uses and real risks; the dishonesty was never the compounds, it was the man selling a fantasy baseline to fifteen-year-olds while quietly running the chemistry kit himself.

If you take one thing away from the whole natty-or-not genre, let it be this: the raw organs and the "primal lifestyle" were the garnish. The 120mg a week was the meal.

Keep Reading

• The Instagram Natty Lie: 8 Physiques Never Natural
• How to Spot Fake Steroids & UGL Scams
• How to Eat on Steroids: The Anabolic Diet Guide
• MK-677 (Ibutamoren): The Hunger Hormone

The Gear

• Alpha Pharma Testosterone Enanthate 250mg
• Alpha Pharma Testosterone Cypionate 250mg