Joe Rogan Family History

Joseph Giacomo Rogan, better known as the podcaster Joe Rogan, was born on August 11th, 1967 to Joe and Susan Rogan in Newark, New Jersey.  He has a younger sister Laura.

His early years were scary.  His father Joe appeared to him as a brute.  When he was five his mother Susan got a divorce.  Two years later they fled New Jersey for San Francisco, never to return.

Susan remarried in San Francisco. Young Joe’s new step-father – a laid-back hippie who ended  up as Vice President of Creative Artists Agency – proved to be a calming influence on him.

Martial Arts.  Even so, Joe still suffered from low self-esteem and confidence.  In his teens he picked up martial arts as a form of escape.  He turned out to be really good at it.  In 1986, when he was nineteen and the family had moved to Massachusetts, he won the U.S. Open Taekwondo championships.  But suffering frequent headaches, he retired from competition two years later.

Stand-up Comedy.  His next venture was stand-up comedy.  He struggled with this in Boston and New York until 1994 when he decided to relocate to Los Angeles.  Here he secured his first major acting role in a nine-episode TV sitcom playing a young egocentric baseball player.

For the next fifteen years his life would be a mix of TV sitcoms, TV hosting, stand-up comedy and martial arts commentating.

The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE).  In 2009 Joe Rogan started up the Joe Rogan Experience as a podcast on YouTube.  By 2015 it had become one of the world’s most popular podcasts, having more than 15 million downloads per month.  By 2019 the number of monthly downloads had reached 190 million.  And in 2020 Joe was able to secure a lucrative multiyear licensing deal with Spotify.

JRE definitely has its bro appeal.  Males form a core part of its audience.  Joe’s long-form conversational format – the podcasts tend to last 2-3 hours – is seen to be more valuable for them than what traditional media offers.  And Joe is curious to pursue issues at length and will often use humor to make complex subjects more accessible.

JRE has included  a wide array of guests on the podcast, such as the business magnate Elon Musk, whistleblower Edward Snowden, Senator Bernie Sanders, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and President Donald Trump. Controversial figures such as Alex Jones have also appeared.  In these polarized times, he is the podcaster most favored by the Republicans; as opposed to Ezra Klein, probably the Democrats’ choice.

Joe himself has lived in Bell Canyon near Los Angeles since 2003.  With the success of the Joe Rogan Experience Joe and his family moved into a $14 million home on Lake Austin in Austin, Texas in 2020.

The Rogan Line

Irish?  The Rogan name is Irish and means “son of Ruadhagán,” a diminutive of the Gaelic word ruadh which means “red” or “redhead.”

This name originated in Ulster.  The Rogans there used to claim a descent from the O’Hanlons, the Lords of Orior in county Armagh.  Today there are more Rogans outside of Ireland than within, the main numbers being in America, England and Australia.

But how Irish is Joe Rogan?  Of his four grandparents, three were Italian and only one was Irish.  That one Irish, Joe’s paternal grandfather, was of course the one who bore the Rogan name.  If we go back a further generation, we find the immigrant Rogans, John Rogan and his wife Annie, who came to America from Ireland.

Rogans in New Jersey.  John and Annie made their home in Harrison, New Jersey (near Newark) where their son James was born in 1910.  A large Italian immigrant population was settling in the area; and James married Italian, Virginia Bione, in the late 1930’s; as did his son Joe Sr. with Susan DiGerlando in the mid 1960’s.

Joe Sr. worked as an officer in the Harrison police department.  In 1967 he would have been called in to deal with the Newark race riots which occurred that summer.  Blacks were rebelling against the Irish/Italian control of their city.  One month later Joe’s son Joe Jr. was born.

Father and Son.  Joe Jr. does not have happy memories of his father.  He later recalled in an interview:

“All my damage sh*t came from my real father, before I was seven.  My real father was crazy, he was like a psychotic person. He beat the f*ck out of my mother, he beat the f*ck out of my cousin.”

Joe Jr. left with his mother for California and there was no contact between the two sides for more than forty years.

Joe Sr. had remarried over this time and retired to a modest home in Kearny, another suburb of Newark.  Then in 2022 one of his daughters by his new wife, seeing how rich and famous her older half-brother had become, pushed her father to make contact with him again.  But Joe Jr. had no time for them.

The Italian Side

Susan Rogan nee DiGerlando named her son Joseph Giacomo Rogan as she had decided to give him an Italian middle name since he was three-quarters Italian.  The main lines here were the Spadones and the DiGerlandos.

Spadones.  Salvino Spadone was from Melfi in southern Italy.  His uncle Vincente Vitelli had come to America in 1901 and settled in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.

In 1912 at the age of eighteen Salvino made the same journey from Naples across the Atlantic on the Hamburg.  He stayed initially with Vincente before moving onto Newark a year later.  He married Genoveffa Annunziata, another recent Italian immigrant, in 1914 and they made their home at  24 Cutler Street in Newark, raising seven children.

These Spadones were an interesting family.

The two brothers John and Frank became coin collectors and published a book on the subject.  In 1940 they opened their coin shop, Ampere Coins, on South Parkway in East Orange.

One of the sisters Josephine married Joseph DiGerlando and they were the grandparents of Joe Rogan.

The youngest sister Elena meanwhile married Arthur Rush and they were the grandparents of the artist/performer Gerard Way, lead vocalist of the rock band My Chemical Romance.  Gerard has said that she was a great creative influence on him.  In 2004, one year after her death, he wrote and recorded a song called Helena about her.  There were three other sisters – Lucia, Anna and Geraldine – who all married as well.

Joe Rogan has made some surprising observations about this family in a podcast.  He said that his grandmother had been in jail for illegal bookmaking and that her sister had murdered her husband.

DiGerlandos.  Salvatore DiGerlando was born in Sicily and came to America with his family around 1918.  He worked in construction, initially in Luzerne county, Pennsylvania and then in New Jersey – first in Newark and later in Nutley where he retired in 1952.

Salvatore and his wife Sussie raised five children.  The youngest of them, Maria, made her mark as an opera singer with the New York City Opera Company.  Later she cared for the children of her sister Josephine who died young.

An older son Joseph, born in Sicily in 1914, married Josie Spadone in Newark in 1940.  They had three children, two sons and their youngest named Assunta which anglicized as Susan.  In 1963 at the age of eighteen Susan graduated from Barringer High School in Newark.   Two years later she married Joe Rogan.  Big mistake!

Joe Rogan’s Family Tree

• The Rogan Side

• John Rogan (1864-1920’s) from Ireland came to America and m. Annie Phelan from Ireland (b. 1868) in Newark, New Jersey in 1892
• – Helen Rogan (b. 1909)
• – James Rogan (1910-1974)

• James Rogan born in Harrison, New Jersey m. Virginia Bione (1917-2002) from an Italian immigrant family also in Harrison
• – Joe Rogan (b. 1941)

• Joe Rogan Sr. m. Susan DiGerlando (b. 1945) in Newark, New Jersey in 1965, divorced in 1972. Joe subsequently remarried and had two further children.
• – Joe Rogan Jr (b. 1967)
• – Laura Bennett nee Rogan (b. 1969)
• – twin half sister Bridget Carselda nee Rogan (b. 1980)
• – twin half sister Rosa Rogan (b.1980) m. Joe Lunelli

• The Italian Side

• Spadone
• Giovanni Spadone (b 1860) m. Lucia Vitelli (b. 1860) in Melfi in southern Italy
• – Savino (Samuel) Spadone (1893-1952), came to New Jersey in 1912
• – Marietta (Mary) Spadone (b. 1895), came to New Jersey in 1913
• – Francesco (Frank) Spadone (1897-1965), came to New Jersey in 1920

• Savino (Samuel) Spadone m. Genoveffa (Jennie) Annunziata from Aquilonia in southern Italy (1893-1972) in Newark, New Jersey in 1914
• – Lucia (Lucy) Spadone (1915-2000) m. Peter Rizzolo
• – Josephine (Josie) Spadone (1917-1999)
• – Anna Spadone (1919-1966) m. Carlo Picardi
• – John Gerardo Spadone (1922-2010), coin collector
• – Frank Gerardo Spadone (1924-2000), coin collector, m. Olympia Pisciotti
• – Geraldine Spadone (1927-2010) m. Charles Strauss
• – Elena (Helena) Spadone (1928-2003) m. Arthur Rush, grandson Gerard Way

• DiGerlando
• Salvatore DiGerlando from Sicily (1884-1969) m. Maria (Sussie) Bruno (1886-1969) and came to Pennsylvania around 1918, later settling in Newark, New Jersey
• – Roger DiGerlando (1910-1964), born in Sicily
• – Joseph DiGerlando (1914-2000), born in Sicily
• – Rev. Peter DiGerlando (1920-2012) m. Ada Comstock, born in Pennsylvania
• – Josephine DiGerlando (1923-1952), m. Tommy Petruzzelli, born in Pennsylvania
• – Maria (Mary) DiGerlando (1925-2010), opera singer m. Albert Lindblom, born in Pennsylvania

• Joseph DiGerlando m.Josephine (Josie) Spadone (1917-1999) in New Jersey in 1940
• – Salvatore DiGerlando (b. 1942) m. Jacqueline Wolf (b. 1947)
• – Vincente (Vinnie) DiGerlando (1943-2023), visual artist
• – Assunta (Susan) DiGerlando (b. 1945)

• Susan DiGerlando m. Joe Rogan (b. 1941) in Newark, New Jersey in 1965, divorced in 1972.  She left in 1974 for San Francisco where she married Louis Lembo
• – Joe Rogan (b. 1967)
• – Laura Bennett nee Rogan (b. 1969)

• Rogan
• Joe Rogan came to California and m. Jessica Ditzel (b. 1975) in Los Angeles in 2009.  They moved to Austin, Texas in 2020
• – Kayja Rose Rogan (b. 1996), adopted from previous Jessica relationship, singer
• – Lola Rogan (b. 2008)
• – Rosy Rogan (b. 2010)