The outside world knows Wim Hof as the eccentric Iceman. His family suffered domestic violence

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So, about him a film will be made with actor Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid’s Tale, Shakespeare in Love) as the protagonist. An ‘inspiring’, ‘moving’, and ‘at times extremely funny’ movie, according to the advance publicity.

For Caroline (65) and her children the news was bitter. For them the name Wim Hof is synonymous with years of aggression, physical violence, humiliation, manipulation and – in Caroline’s case – also sexual abuse. They know the Iceman, as Hof calls himself, as a mean drunk with an explosive character and delusions of grandeur. Someone of whom they had to be permanently wary.

For example, in 2012 Hof was sentenced by the court to community service and a fine because he had assaulted Caroline’s oldest son Christiaan. The incident also resulted in a temporary restraining order imposed on him by the mayor of Amsterdam: he was no longer allowed to come near the family. The explanation states that Hof ‘used physical violence’ against Caroline, Christiaan, and Noah and ‘made death threats’, that ‘the gravity and frequency of the violence has increased over the years’ and that the children had been ‘witnesses to and victims of that violence’.

In 2015, the Dutch Child Welfare Council concluded that Hof had committed so much psychological violence against his son Noah that the boy never felt safe with him. The court therefore decided that Hof had forfeited the right of parental access.

In his written answer to the 44 questions de Volkskrant put to him, Wim Hof denies having ever been violent. He views the accusations as manipulation by Caroline. ‘It is obvious that she’s on the warpath and now wants to make everything look different from how it was.’

Even though they haven’t seen or spoken to Hof for eleven years, Caroline and her children are still struggling with profound feelings of unsafety and inferiority on a daily basis.

It is painful to them that the man responsible for this has so many followers today. The news of the movie, which may further promote Hof’s heroic and loving image, is the last straw for them. A few months after having been approached by the producer, Caroline, in consultation with her children, contacted de Volkskrant to tell their story.

That story, supported by court verdicts, a report from Child Welfare, medical files, emails, and a complaint against Hof pertaining to physical abuse of a previous partner, paint a shady side of one of the most influential health gurus in the world.

From documents read by de Volkskrant it appears that Hof’s fame was a catalyst for his aggression. He became fully convinced of his own genius, became more and more demanding, and no longer tolerated any criticism.

At the same time, his fame made it more difficult for Caroline and her children to talk about their precarious situation because who would believe that this sympathetic Iceman would be capable of such terrible things?

All the same, they speak out now. This past year, Caroline, Nathalie, and Noah had a number of interviews with de Volkskrant (Christiaan has confirmed their story in writing).

They hope that, by going public, they can distance themselves from the myth that Hof created around himself and his family. In Noah’s words: ‘So that we can go our own way and no longer be part of this lie.’

Their story provides insight into a broader societal problem that is often obscured from view: domestic violence. According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics some 1.3 million Dutch citizens are affected by this every year. Over half a million people were physically abused in 2022 and over 700,000 individuals had their freedom limited by coercive control of a partner or family member. In the Netherlands, a woman is killed every eight days, mainly by an (ex-)partner or family member.

That last phenomenon, femicide, is gaining more and more attention in the media. But not the years of abuse, control, and mental manipulation preceding it in most cases. That’s why experts say it is important to share the stories: recognising the underlying pattern can save lives.

Caroline met Wim Hof at the time when he was still organising tree climbing parties. In 1996 she hired him for a children’s party for Christiaan. ‘He was a bit of a hippie-like character,’ she recalls. ‘And he was good-looking.’ Over the next few years, she booked him two more times for a children’s party.

They had interesting conversations. ‘We shared a love of nature. I speak Spanish quite well and he had lived in Spain. So, we kept in touch.’

Hof told her about the great drama in his life: how his wife Olaya, the Spanish mother of his four children, had committed suicide in 1995. Caroline felt sorry for him. ‘He was on his own, caring for these four children. I wanted to help him.’

Caroline herself also went through a difficult time. She was recovering from a serious car accident. Her marriage was at a dead end. And here was Wim Hof, telling her about how he had swum under the ice in Finland. ‘I was attracted to that adventurous side of him.’ So when he asked her to join him on a trip to Spain to make a documentary, she agreed. ‘After five years of rehabilitation I did feel like doing something again.’

Gradually, according to Caroline, Hof intimated that he liked her a lot. ‘He seemed very pure, saying how he hadn’t been in a relationship anymore after the death of his wife and was very inexperienced in these matters. It was almost touching.’

And so Caroline, recently divorced, became involved in a new relationship in the summer of 2001. A photo from those days shows her sitting on Hof’s back, smiling.

Soon Hof could be found in Caroline’s spacious family home almost every day. Her children too got along very well with Hof and built sandcastles with him.

Hof told Caroline that he was embarrassed by living of social benefits, she says. ‘There was trouble with debts, and one day his gas and electricity were cut off. He risked becoming homeless. So I said: come live with us for a while. His children had already lost their mother and I took pity on them.’

Things deteriorated rapidly. In the autumn of 2001, the new family situation caused tensions.

Hof’s eldest son Enahm, 18 at the time, already went back to the empty parental home after a couple of days.

A series of incidents made the situation with Hof’s other three children also untenable. After a few months, they – 16, 15 and 13 at the time – left to go live with their brother.According to Caroline, Hof did go over to have dinner with them and would sometimes spend the night there. But no matter how much she urged him to, he showed no intention to move back in with his family permanently. ‘He saw it as a temporary situation, telling me that it would be resolved,’ says Caroline. ‘I tried to involve social services, but he would become aggressive. I reached out to his brothers, but no one in the family wanted to involve the authorities.’

‘That’s true,’ says Wim’s twin brother André. ‘We’re not big fans of authorities.’ Hof himself writes, in a response to de Volkskrant, that he was too ‘overwhelmed by emotions to take any action.’

Mails and letters that Hof himself wrote around 2010 to Caroline and her children reveal a cold attitude towards his eldest sons and daughters: ‘I’ve been a bastard, because of my situation and my children who, driven by other realities, have poisoned my heart.’ And, in another email: ‘They won’t change unless I make a lot of money.’

According to Caroline, Hof would sometimes compare his children to their mother, who was supposed to have been ‘dark and unhealthy’. This was also a way to adulate Caroline. ‘That would make me the light, the future. He wanted to have a healthy child with me, he would say.’

According to British Professor in Criminology Jane Monckton-Smith, badmouthing an ex and praising a new partner to the skies can be a warning signal for what is termed ‘intimate terror’ in her field. In her view this is the most dangerous form of domestic violence, one in which the perpetrator completely controls the victim. In her research, Monckton-Smith, a former police detective and now an international authority when it comes to femicide, discovered that intimate terror almost always follows a set pattern.

She is not familiar with Hof’s case, but in a video interview she outlines how this pattern looks in general. One of the tell-tale signs is that perpetrators very quickly push towards big steps in the beginning stages of the relationship – living together, marrying, having children. ‘Perpetrators want commitment from their partners, because it gives them control.’ ‘This is why quickly pressing for a pregnancy against their partner’s wishes is a big red flag. Once you have a child together, that is a lifelong basis for control.’

Caroline wasn’t keen to become pregnant. ‘When I told him that I was not on the pill and that we needed to be careful, he would say: ‘That’s nature, that’s wonderful, isn’t it?’ I was already 42 at a time and I thought the risk wasn’t that high.’

But it was. Early in 2002 she became pregnant. Her daughter Nathalie remembers how this changed Hof’s attitude. ‘He became more aggressive, felt more powerful.’ Caroline: ‘I didn’t want an abortion and he knew that. That’s when he had me cornered.’

The first time Caroline suffered serious physical violence she was a few months pregnant, as she stated in her report to the police. As she remembered it, Hof confronted her in the living room one evening, roaring with rage, after she had once again asked him to find a solution for his children. ‘He slapped my face,’ Caroline now states. ‘Then he dragged me through the room by my hair and tried to kick me in the belly. I was just about able to hide behind the couch, so his kick only grazed me. Then he left.’

Hof denies that this incident took place, but admits there were ‘disagreements’. ‘Caroline always knew how to get quickly under my skin.’

Studies into domestic violence show that it relatively often begins or worsens during pregnancy, although criminologist Monckton-Smith believes that it is the underlying controlling behaviour that becomes more manifest then. ‘When the woman becomes pregnant, her priorities change. The controlling man can find it hard to accept that she is paying more attention to herself and the baby than to him. In addition, there are outsiders who have an influence on the victim, such as obstetricians and doctors. For controlling partners, they constitute a threat.’

A few days after having molested her, Hof stood crying on her doorstep, says Caroline. ‘He said that his outburst was caused by the grief he felt over his children leaving,’ Caroline recounts. ‘He made me feel that their leaving was my fault and so I was indirectly also guilty of the abuse.’ She let him back into the house.

Six months later, in November 2002, Noah was born.

Early 2003, Caroline ended up in A & E because she had been assaulted. ‘Cast-iron pan on right elbow. Abused by husband,’ the doctor noted in her medical file. Her bruised elbow was bandaged. Hof calls this a ‘greatly exaggerated incident’, claiming that he ‘isn’t a violent man’. But according to various documents the violent incidents accumulated in the years that followed.

The children too sometimes fell victim to Hof’s physical aggression. ‘He kicked me one time and he also pushed me once,’ Christiaan told the police. ‘He elbowed me in the face, damaging my tongue,’ Nathalie stated when she was interviewed as a witness. ‘At the time he said it was an accident. He also threw hot coffee on my face. I was not allowed to stand inside his energy circle. My face was all red.’ Hof denies all this.

Alcohol would make Hof more aggressive, Caroline and her children say. ‘There is often alcohol involved,’ Christiaan declared to the police. ‘He drinks six half litres of beer every day.’ Hof himself told Volkskrant Magazine in 2022 interview: ‘I was drinking, at that time. Yes, I was drinking. But I also did my job.’ Now, he says: ‘Because of her (Caroline – ed.) I started drinking, yes.’

A neighbour living in the apartment below the family at the time states that she often came across Hof drunk in the stairwell. She also claims to have suffered noise nuisance for many years, ‘as if chairs or other heavy furniture were thrown about’.

There are more people who accuse Hof of domestic violence. This is evident from a report in writing that was submitted to the Utrecht Prosecution Office. The person submitting it: Hof’s oldest brother Rob, with whom he had been at loggerheads for many years.

In his report, Rob holds Hof responsible for the death by drowning of ‘at least thirteen’ people who practised the Wim Hof Method. According to Rob, he has been telling his brother that he should warn people of the dangers involved. Hof himself has always said that he sufficiently stresses that people should not do his breathing exercises in the water. ‘Wim refuses to take any responsibility,’ Rob says on the phone. ‘That’s why I decided to report him.’

In his report he also relates the history of Hof’s first wife Olaya. She died in Spain in 1995. In 1998, Wim Hof said in de Volkskrant that his first wife had died in a ‘run-of-the-mill car crash’. In 2022, Hof stated in an interview that she had jumped from an apartment building, ‘eight storeys down’.

According to Rob, Hof also abused Olaya. ‘From the very beginning until Olaya’s death in 1995 there was a lot of domestic violence in their marriage,’ he states in his report, which he recently discussed with the Prosecution Office. ‘I observed from close by (…) how Wim would leave his wife and children to their own devices without adequate clothing or food while he was out pulling dangerous stunts.’ According to Rob Hof, Olaya was completely dependent on his brother and she had to beg for food. From his report: ‘That didn’t sit well with Wim and he would beat her. If that didn’t help, he would lock her up in a kitchen cupboard.’

Others who were familiar with the couple in those days paint a less clear image. ‘They were financially struggling and the children would not get their gym shoes in time,’ says Wim’s twin brother André. ‘Olaya would probably have been better off with someone who is not exclusively focused on his own goals. One could call that neglect. I have never seen Wim commit physical violence.’

Rob’s partner at the time writes in an email, which de Volkskrant has, that she remembers Wim beating Olaya, ‘but I can’t remember whether it was Olaya who told me herself or that you (Rob – ed.) did.’

Hof calls the allegations ‘absurd’ and informs us that they ‘are absolutely baseless.’ His four oldest children have written to de Volkskrant that they have never seen their father commit acts of violence.

In 2006, Caroline thought her life would end. That night she wasn’t getting through to Hof anymore. By now she had developed some tricks to take him out of his angry mood. She would give him a beer or suggest they lay down in bed together. This time however it didn’t work. ‘He grabbed me by the throat, cutting of my breath. I came very close to dying. Eventually he let go, probably because Noah was around.’ A report from Child Welfare confirms this incident. ‘Not true,’ according to Hof.

Kees van Dijk, a therapist Caroline was consulting at the time, relates by telephone that she came to see him shortly after the incident. ‘I saw red splotches and scratches on her neck. I advised her to report him to the police and leave him. But she was scared to death of that man.’

Why didn’t she just send him packing? It is a question Caroline has put to herself very often. ‘I was mainly terrified that he would do something terrible to me or my children if I would throw him out for good.’

And sometimes a little hope resurfaced, when Hof would unexpectedly sing her praises. ‘Then I was a Queen, the most beautiful woman in the world and he would write beautiful poems to me.’ And so, year after year, every outburst was followed by reconciliation.

For criminologist Monckton-Smith it is the most prominent question of her career: why doesn’t she leave? After studying hundreds of femicide cases the criminologist has come to the conclusion that women don’t leave because they estimate that leaving is more dangerous than staying. And quite often this is the case. ‘To leave means to escalate,’ says Monckton-Smith. ‘We, as a society, say to these women that they should leave, but if they do there is no one to protect them against the violence. Women do not make a conscious decision to remain in the relationship; they just stay until they have safe escape plan.’

Caroline’s children too had to live completely as the whims of the Iceman dictated. Noah recounts how, from his earliest childhood on, everything revolved around Wim Hof, even his own sixth birthday. ‘I had broken my leg shortly before that. But on my children’s party he wanted to go and fly kites in the park. So, there I was, on my own birthday, with my leg in plaster, watching my dad having fun flying kites with all the other children. At some point you start thinking, as a child: I know my place, I am nothing.’

In 2015 – he was 13 at the time – Noah told Child Welfare that his father didn’t approve of him taking ballet classes, as ballet was ‘for gays’. The report of this interview states that Noah ‘has to cry when he tells he’s afraid of his father’.

From an early age, he did his utmost to be ‘a good boy’, Noah says now. ‘I figured: as long as I’m a good boy, Wim has no reason for outbursts.’

Hof’s floods of verbal abuse were the order of the day, say Caroline and her children.

‘Wim constantly watched how I ate and how much I ate,’ says Nathalie. ‘And then he would call me a ‘fat pig’.’ Caroline says that Hof called her a ‘whore’, for talking to other men. In an email he called her ‘dirty bitch whore’.

‘In every relationship people use terms of abuse for each other,’ says Hof in an email. ‘I don’t remember this one.’

Noah too became the butt of ‘various degrading remarks’, wrote the Child Welfare Council in its report. Hof claimed to Noah that ‘Noah is not his son, but that his brother is his father’.

For perpetrators, humiliation is a way of maintaining control over their partners, says Anke van Dijke. As the director of Fier (Proud), a centre of expertise around violence in dependency relationships, she knows numerous women (and the odd man) who have experiences similar to Caroline’s.

‘If you are being belittled or threatened with your life for years, your self-respect and resilience are systematically broken down. You then start to think it is all your own fault and you start to submit to your partner.’

According to Van Dijke, most victims of domestic violence hardly dare say anything. ‘Usually, they are dealing with feelings of shame and are afraid that no one will believe them. Sometimes also because their partners can be very strong, charming, and cooperative towards others.’

It was no different with Caroline. ‘Wim was always very social with other people.’ Hof was also increasingly making a name for himself in the world. In TV programs Hof could be seen dangling from a rope between two hot air balloons by just one finger and walk a half marathon above the polar circle, barefoot.

Hof’s growing fame enhanced his delusions of grandeur, says Caroline. ‘He often called us ‘mediocre people’. And when I developed diabetes, he said: ‘You deserve this. You are Mrs Diabetes and I am the Iceman.’ According to Hof, he was not delusional, ‘if you see wat the Wim Hof Method has accomplished in the world.’ ‘That’s bigger than de Volkskrant and the Netherlands.’

Hof’s attempts to break records aggravated his dominance, says Caroline. ‘When Wim came home again, he was often quite tattered. His feet would be covered in cold-induced burns. He demanded that I take care of him then, instead of looking after my children.’ Hof says that, on the contrary, everything always was about Caroline and the children: ‘I was just their servant.’

Meanwhile, Hof’s fame made it almost impossible for Caroline and her children to share anything about the situation with others. Caroline: ‘If I would tentatively say something about his outbursts, for instance at Noah’s school, the response often was: ‘Yeah well, he’s an eccentric man, isn’t he?’’

In 2010, Nathalie (16 at the time) had enough of living together with an aggressive stepfather. Seeing that her mother was not able to force a change, she did. ‘One night he called me a ‘pig’ again. I gave him the middle finger and said to my mother: ‘Mum, I’m leaving and I’m not coming back until this man is out of the house.’’

Nathalie left and Caroline agreed with Hof that he would be gone after she and the children returned from a holiday that week. ‘But when we came home, he was still there.’ And shortly after, following a workshop in Poland, he came back home again, ignoring the agreement. ‘That was on a Saturday,’ says Caroline. ‘I demanded that he’d leave. He promised he would definitely leave Sunday night.’

The threat of the relationship being ended is the main trigger for controlling partners to turn to serious violence and even murder, as Jane Monckton-Smith’s research shows. ‘These people tend to see a divorce as an attack on their ego and their rights. For fear of being humiliated and losing control, they will try and reinstate their status.’

It’s for good reason that Caroline will always remember that Saturday 8 May 2010 as one of the most horrific days of her life.

According to Caroline, Hof had promised to find other accommodation, but she noticed that he was not planning to leave. ‘I felt the threat rising whenever I mentioned the fact that he had to leave.’ Hof states: ‘I didn’t want to leave, I loved her.’

Hof started drinking beer that day, getting more and more beside himself. Noah told Child Welfare how his dad pulled him up into the air by his legs while shouting at Caroline.

Caroline’s report to the police shows that that night Hof took a plate from the cupboard, pushed it against the side of her head, and said: ‘If I smash this you will suffer severe ear damage, (…) It will then go to your eye and that will be damaged too.’

In an unguarded moment she snuck outside, called her oldest son Christiaan and urged him to quickly come home on his bicycle. From the later police report filed by Christiaan: ‘Wim opened the door and immediately started shouting very aggressively that he would smash my head in. He was making these karate moves. At one point he punched me in the stomach. (…) Out of self-defence I then slapped his face.’

They got into a fight in which Christiaan suffered a nosebleed and a black eye. Caroline meanwhile managed to call the police. Just when Hof attempted to throw a large glass fruit bowl at Christiaan, police officers entered the living room and arrested him.

To Child Welfare Hof stated in 2015 that ‘probably will have hit him’. Now, he claims that there was a ‘grappling’. ‘No hitting. Just holding.’

A few days after the scuffle, Christiaan filed a report and Nathalie gave a witness statement. Caroline also filed a report, extensively detailing the many years of violence.

The mayor of Amsterdam issued Hof with a restraining order of two weeks, which was extended once.

But he wouldn’t leave them alone. Almost immediately Caroline started getting intimidating phone calls, which she repeatedly reported to the police. In the police reports, which de Volkskrant has seen, one officer wrote in April 2011: ‘Last time, he allegedly said that he would kill her and the children if they would not withdraw their complaints.’ Hof denies this.

Hof also sent numerous emails in which he called her and her children ‘dirty bastards’ and ‘monstrous assholes’ and described himself as someone who ‘may win the Nobel prize’. In one of his emails, he blamed Caroline for his aggressiveness: ‘Death threats, that’s what you have caused.’

Hof now explains these emails as follows: ‘They had succeeded in their intention (to get him out of the house – ed.) and I found it a dirty business. I still do.’

Stalking behaviour is typical after a relationship ends, concludes Monckton-Smith. ‘And when a stalker realises that the separation is irreversible, you have to watch them carefully.’ A dangerous turn then looms: they will no longer try to get the victim back in the relationship, but will try to destroy her.

In late 2010, Hof sent Christiaan a letter in which he suddenly changed his tune and for the first time acknowledged his violence, if only partly. He wrote that he was ‘sorry’ for ‘many situations of cropped-up anger’ and ‘the idiotic outbursts that were the result of tensions within my being’. In a letter to Nathalie Hof called himself an ‘asshole’ who ‘no longer knew his limits, caused tension and burst out in anger’.

Hof says that he ‘tried to be remorseful at the time’, thinking ‘it would make a difference in the situation of separation’.

On 18 April 2011, Hof had to appear before the magistrate’s court to answer for the assault on Christiaan. He didn’t deny the facts, as the court record that was made by order of Caroline’s lawyer Ariane Hendriks shows. ‘I have been treated disrespectfully within the family for years,’ he said in his defence. ‘I was the one who brought home the bacon, but I was not allowed to exert any authority.’

Hof felt embarrassed for having to show up in court. From the record: ‘This is not me. I am the Iceman. I climb the Himalayas in shorts. I swim in ice water. (…) This whole court case, I find it humiliating.’

The magistrate was not impressed. ‘This gentleman calls himself the Iceman,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, he has many personal problems. For example, you have hurt yourself by sitting on a fountain (in 2008, Hof attempted to give himself an enema with the fountain in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, resulting in a bowl perforation – ed.) Having read this case, I cannot help but thinking that what you do as a sportsman is perhaps an escape from the reality of your personal life.’ Hof was sentenced to do 40 hours of community service and pay a fine of 350 euros.

The police report Caroline filed about the many years of domestic violence did not lead to a court case. She doesn’t know why it didn’t. Her lawyer never received a confirmation of dismissal, as is customary.

It has damaged her faith in the justice system, says Caroline. ‘It was a huge step for me to report him to the police. The female police officer said at the time: ‘Well, ma’am, I’ve seen a lot, but this is pretty intense.’ So, I assumed Wim would be given a severe sentence. But then I heard nothing anymore. It made me feel very unsafe.’

Recently, after inquiries from de Volkskrant, the Prosecution contacted Caroline. The public prosecutor apologized for the fact that she had never heard anything further about her report. Nevertheless, the prosecutor confirmed to de Volkskrant, the report was re-evaluated and finally dismissed ‘for lack of evidence’.

Following Hof’s conviction his aggression took on new forms. This manifested itself during the fortnightly contact moments he had with Noah. Child Welfare l later wrote in its report: ‘The father uses these contact moments to fulminate against the mother and badmouth her and her two oldest children. (…) Noah witnessed these floods of abuse.’

Child Welfare also noted that Hof would coerce Caroline to have sex with him during contact moments with her and Noah ‘either by threatening to take Noah away from her, but also for money’. Hof now calls that allegation ‘lies and manipulation of the truth’.

Ashamed, Caroline tells how Hof would make paying maintenance dependent on whether she was prepared to have sex with him or not. Therapist Kees van Dijk and Caroline’s lawyer Ariane Hendriks confirm that she also told them this at the time.

‘Only later, in therapy, I started to realise that what he was doing was actually rape.’, says Caroline. ‘He would constantly threaten me, for example that he would do something to Christiaan. By giving into his demands, I was hoping to keep us safe.’

In some instances, Hof forced her to have sexual content while Noah was present, says Caroline. Noah doesn’t want to talk about this. ‘It is still too sensitive.’

He does talk about a telephone call from his father the day after his birthday. ‘He wasn’t interested at all in my birthday. He just informed me that he was on his way to have sex with another woman because my mother no longer wanted to have sex with him.’

‘All lies,’ is Hof’s reaction, who had a number of new girlfriends after Caroline. Two of them have informed de Volkskrant that they have never experienced any violence from Hof. One of the women does confirm that he had a ‘drinking problem’. The other one says that their relation went on the rocks because ‘Hof’s fame didn’t make him more pleasant’.

In 2011, Noah was examined by a child neurologist who concluded that his cluster headaches were caused by the stress at home. Social workers regarded him as a traumatised child, the Child Welfare files show. These files also include an anecdote that underlines the megalomania of his father: in January 2013, Hof demanded that his son come to the Thialf ice skating stadium in Heerenveen to watch ‘the Iceman’ walk one kilometre barefoot on the ice, together with hundreds of others. Noah, however, had ballet classes that particular Saturday. ‘Father bursts out in anger, shouting whether Noah perhaps thinks that is only important what he does and whether perhaps he doesn’t love his father,’ the report states.

Eleven years later Hof still feels that it was ‘shameless and insensitive’ that Noah as a 10-year-old refused to come and watch his father.

In July 2013, Noah met with his father for the last time. Later, Hof attempted to enforce that his son would be allowed to stay with him for a weekend once every fortnight. The handwritten note that the then 12-year-old Noah sent to the court said: ‘I do not want to be with my father. I feel unsafe and anxious when I’m with him. I feel like a sheep in a pack of wolves.’

In 2015 the court denied Hof’s request for an arrangement for parental access.

In that same period, the court strongly refuted Hof’s claim that he could not afford more than 25 euros of monthly child maintenance for Noah. In reality, money was pouring in.

With the help of his son Enahm, Hof had managed to transform his chaotic thinking into a true philosophy: the Wim Hof Method. Starting in 2015, the workshops were selling like hot cakes. Thanks to a Vice documentary that was viewed 10 million times and a number of Hollywood celebrities who declared themselves fans, his star was also rising internationally. In an interview in the Daily Mail Hof stated in 2022 that a British company had paid him 50,000 euros for a speech. ‘For one hour!’

Eleven years after having seen his father for the last time, Noah is still struggling with the damage Hof inflicted upon him in his childhood. ‘Wim made me think that it would be better if I didn’t exist. It has made it difficult for me to open up to people.’

He also suffers from physical complaints. ‘Multiple times a day I feel enormous pain in my chest. Sometimes I can’t even get up out of a chair. It’s all caused by fear and stress.’

Since 2021, Noah is a dancer with the prestigious Bayerische Staatsballett in Munich. Recently, however, he had to call in sick. ‘These pains also bothered me while dancing. I never wanted any help, but last autumn I hit a wall. I went into therapy and was diagnosed with PTSD.’

Hof doesn’t seem very impressed by his son’s suffering and blames it ‘on their own insensitive intentions’ that Noah and his mother and brother and sister now have to ‘deal with their psyche’. Adding: ‘They never had any respect for my sports achievements, my discipline, and my belief. Some proper introspection is in order here.’

Because of all the comments Hof made about her body and her eating habits, Nathalie ‘still has a problematic relation towards my body,’ she says.

For her mother Caroline alertness has become second nature. ‘In a café I know exactly who is sitting at what table and where the exit is.’ At home she always has the radio and lights on. ‘Silence and darkness feel unsafe.’

Both Carolyn and her three children are seeing a trauma therapist. Previously, Caroline and Noah received training from the ‘Blijf Groep’, an organisation that supports victims of domestic violence.

Meanwhile, there is no escaping Wim Hof for them. If they are not reminded of him through newspaper articles, television performances or social media, people in their surroundings do so by raving about taking cold showers.

Last summer this was aggravated by an American court case in which Hof’s company was sued over the death of a 17-year-old girl who drowned shortly after allegedly having done Hof’s breathing exercises. When asked whether he was ever involved in a court case, Hof lied: ‘No.’

In July, a Los Angeles court ruled that Hof and his company are not liable for her death.

‘The media attention surrounding this court case brings back a lot of old pain,’ says Caroline.

Hof, who had his sixth child in 2018 with his current partner and is about to become a father again soon, according to his twin brother, has spoken several times about his past with Caroline in interviews. He cast himself in the role of victim, like he did in the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad in 2021: ‘I was left behind like a wounded animal. I had nobody left. I wasn’t even allowed to see the son I had with her anymore.’

Caroline and her children fear that it is this version of events that will be elaborated upon in the announced movie The Iceman. The film doesn’t promise to be a critical portrait. ‘I am honoured to play the role of the great Wim Hof,’ said leading men Joseph Fiennes in an interview. On Hof’s website the film is announced jubilantly: ‘We can’t wait to see Wim, his turbulent past and epic accomplishments being brought to life!’

In August last year, Caroline’s lawyer informed production company Genesius Pictures that Caroline and her children did not want to be part of the film, pointing out that Hof was guilty of domestic violence and had been convicted of this.

This spring, Genesius Pictures emailed that ‘the movie will not have any characters in it that are based on Caroline and her children’. Whether The Iceman will mention the domestic violence committed by Hof, is a question from de Volkskrant the production company declined to answer.

Caroline and her children are not reassured by this. For them the continuous stream of falsehoods and distortions – to which the movie may add a little extra – is the main motive for going public now. ‘I really would never say anything about my father to people I don’t know very well,’ says Noah. ‘Or I would remain vague and say there were problems in the family. I was ashamed and it was too complicated to explain time and again: he is not who you think he is. He is different.’

Translation: Leo Reijnen