Logan Paul Gets Punched in Face by Rival, Shows off Bruise

Logan Paul took a serious punch to the face on Friday night from his new rival Kevin Owens on WWE SmackDown. Paul posted a photo on Instagram later that night to show fans the damage – a reddish bruise covering his temple that is sure to darken into a real black eye before it heals. Paul will have a chance to get Owens back for this attack when the two face off at Royal Rumble 2024.

Paul was the WWE United States Champion for 2023, and on Friday night he attended the match that would decide his first big challenger for 2024. Owens was the winner of an eight-man tournament to determine who would face Paul, first defeating Austin Theory and Carmelo Hayes last year, and now defeating Santos Escobar in the finals. After the fight, Paul got in the ring to taunt Owens, which is when Owens threw a savage punch to get their rivalry started.

Paul shared a selfie later on his Instagram Story with the caption: "He actually got me." Owens even has a broken hand right now, but while you might expect that to weaken his punching strength, the hardened cast only seemed to make the damage worse. Later, in an interview on SmackDown LowDown, Owens said that he does not feel guilty for taking this shot at Paul.

"Conflicted? Not conflicted," Owens said. "Conflicted is when you have two different emotions, right? I feel elated that I hit him in his stupid face and that I beat Santos [Escobar]. And now I get to do it again at Royal Rumble when I beat Logan Paul, and become United States Champion as a Canadian. Clearly, you're busy doing other things instead of paying attention to WWE a few years ago. I don't even wanna know what you were up to. I don't want to. Nobody does. Point is, I'm going to beat you, and I'm going to restore the prestige to the U.S. title as a Canadian."

Paul is still best known to most people for his YouTube videos, social media content and his viral controversies. The 28-year-old made international headlines in 2017 when he filmed the corpse of a suicide victim for one of his vlogs – a controversy that interfered with his content output and his collaborations with major Hollywood studios. This stirred up other backlash for things Paul had said or done over the years and things he continued to say and do in the years that followed.

Meanwhile, Paul came under scrutiny from a different angle starting in 2021 when he released an NFT-based video game called CryptoZoo, which was widely described as a "cryptocurrency scam." Paul is currently offering partial refunds to investors in the game in exchange for the promise that they won't sue him.

In the meantime, Paul's involvement in combat sports has become a bigger and bigger part of his public persona. He began with an amateur boxing match in 2018 and found his way into the WWE in 2021. Paul will now have to defend his 2023 title in the 2024 Royal Rumble, a WWE "premium live event" scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. ET.