Paul Edward Hospenthal has been described publicly twice, both times by the woman he was married to, and the two accounts do not sit together.
The first came in November 2012, on Facebook. “Paul and I have decided to amicably end our marriage,” Patrick wrote, seven years after they married. She called him an important person and a friend and said that was how things would stay between them.
The second came in 2018, on Graham Bensinger’s interview show. Patrick said she had been manipulated. She said she went five straight years without seeing her parents at Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Hospenthal has never responded to either account.
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The physical therapist Danica Patrick married
He was born in 1965, which puts him in his early sixties, and he has practiced as a physical therapist in Scottsdale, Arizona for at least two decades. People described him in 2012 as a physical therapist and personal trainer whose specialty was fitness for golfers. By 2007 he was running the Desert Institute of Physical Therapy in north Scottsdale, an outpatient orthopedic and sports rehabilitation practice.
Patrick first came to him as a patient in 2002, reportedly for a hip injury she picked up doing yoga. He is seventeen years older than her.
Whatever happened between that appointment and the engagement has never been described by either of them. What sits on the record is that they got engaged on Thanksgiving Day 2004 and married in Scottsdale on November 19, 2005. She was 23 and he was 40. Patrick asked her team at Rahal Letterman Racing to put out almost nothing about the ceremony, and the only detail confirmed at the time was that her car owner, Bobby Rahal, attended.
Around the wedding he gave People a few sentences about his new wife, calling her “kind of a TV junkie” who liked barbecuing and working out. Twenty-one years on, that is close to the last thing he is known to have said about her in public.
Six years of photographs, all of them taken for somebody else
Getty Images holds dozens of pictures of Hospenthal, and every one exists because a photographer was pointing a camera at his wife.
They begin at the ESPY Awards in Hollywood in July 2006, where the caption has him leading Patrick in as they arrive. He is back at the ESPYs the following July, and a separate frame from that night puts the couple backstage with the driver Dario Franchitti and the actress Ashley Judd. In May 2008 the two of them are waving to the crowd from the 500 Festival Parade in Indianapolis.
Then the Arizona charity circuit. He appears at Muhammad Ali’s Celebrity Fight Night in Phoenix in March 2009, posing alongside Forest Whitaker and Keisha Whitaker, and again at the same event a year later.
The racing photographs come last. November 2010, Homestead-Miami, standing with Patrick before the Ford 300. July 2011, Daytona, the two of them standing for the national anthem. February 27, 2012, Daytona again, this time on the grid before the start of the Daytona 500, her first race in NASCAR’s top division.
Every caption identifies him the same way, as her husband. None of them says anything else about him.
What the court file says, which is not much
Patrick announced the split on November 20, 2012, one day after their seventh wedding anniversary. She signed the divorce petition on New Year’s Eve, and it reached Maricopa County Superior Court three days later, on January 3, 2013.
The petition gave no reason beyond the standard finding that the marriage was “irretrievably broken and there is no reasonable prospect of reconciliation.” There was a prenuptial agreement. Neither of them asked for alimony. Arizona is a no-fault state, and both sides agreed neither was to blame. They used mediation to divide whatever the prenup did not already cover. They had no children.
A judge signed the decree on April 17, 2013.
The version that came later
In 2018, Patrick sat with Bensinger and talked about the years when both her parents were on her payroll. They had sold the family glass company to work for her, driving her bus and managing her career.
“I was in a relationship where I was forced to choose” between her husband and her parents, she told him. She said she missed Thanksgiving and Christmas with them for five years running. Bensinger asked her directly whether the partner she was describing was the source of that pressure, and she said he was. She and her parents repaired things after the marriage ended.
Her ex-husband has said nothing about any of it, then or since, and there is no obvious way to ask him. He has no listed representative and no verified profile under his name on LinkedIn or any social platform, and no outlet appears to have obtained a comment from him at any point since 2013. A search of Arizona’s public physical therapy licensing database by this publication returned no record under his surname, though a lapsed license would produce the same result. The Scottsdale clinic he was running now shows as closed at that address, and Desert Institute of Physical Therapy was bought by the training company EXOS in November 2019.
What grew in the silence
Search his name and you will find, repeated across dozens of sites, that he owns a vineyard in Napa Valley producing Cabernet Sauvignon. He does not. The vineyard is Patrick’s. She bought the Howell Mountain property in 2009, and her Somnium label reached shelves in 2017. Her winery names her as proprietor and she has given interviews about it for years. Somebody took his ex-wife’s business, filed it under his name, and everybody else copied it.
The rest of him has gone the same way. His net worth is reported as one million dollars on some pages and fifteen million on others, and none of the figures trace back to anything a reader could check. His university changes depending on where you land. A second marriage appears on celebrity aggregator sites and nowhere else. His height and his parents’ names shift from page to page. He has no Wikipedia entry, so there is no version of him that anybody has ever had to defend with sources.
None of this is unusual for a private person attached to a famous one. The volume is what stands out. Almost nothing about Hospenthal has been newly verified since 2013, and the amount written about him has kept climbing anyway.
Where that leaves him
Patrick never stopped being visible. She retired from racing in 2018, built the wine business, started a podcast, worked as a Formula One analyst for Sky Sports through the end of 2025, and said on a podcast in June 2025 that she was single. Every time she is asked about her past, his name comes back around with it.
His silence has been read as dignity and read as evasion, and neither reading can be tested against anything he has said, because he has not said anything. Thirteen years after the decree, there is still no third account of that marriage, and the only person who could give one has never shown any interest in doing so.
