Somehow, in the year 2026, the biggest beef in media right now is Barstool vs. TMZ over a photo of Hank at an F45 class that allegedly captured the aftermath of a juicy one. It started as a dumb internet moment and has now spiraled into a full-blown content war, with BigCat treating it like a case study in how NOT to do crisis comms.
BigCat framing the whole thing as a textbook example of how to make a small story enormous.
PR disaster class. It’d be like sending a cease and desist to try and get people to stop saying Hank ripped a juicy fart
The logic tracks. The fastest way to guarantee that millions of people associate a person with ripping a fart in a gym class is to try and stop them from saying it. Streisand effect 101. Instead of the photo quietly dying in a TMZ scroll, it's now Pardon My Take material, it's BigCat tweets, it's a multi-day arc — and Hank's name recognition has officially branched into a brand new demographic.
The new reality for Hank — an entire chunk of the audience that knows him from one thing and one thing only.
PMT jumped on it immediately, with the crew calling out TMZ for crossing a line by running the F45 picture in the first place. The bit basically writes itself: a gossip outlet built on celebrity grime decided the hill to die on was a man at a fitness class. Hank, for his part, has leaned into the physics-of-it-all defense, which BigCat has been more than happy to amplify.
BigCat coming to Hank's defense and pointing out that a lot of people don't understand physics.
The cease and desist angle is what pushes this from normal media shrapnel into actual disaster territory. You don't send legal paper over a fart joke unless you want every podcast, every clip account, and every bored person on the internet to spend a week talking about the fart joke. Barstool has the megaphone, the audience, and now the moral high ground of being the ones getting lawyered at. TMZ picked the wrong target, picked the wrong story, and somehow picked the wrong escalation — and BigCat is dunking accordingly.