Transcript
Before we get into today's episode, I want to let you know that there are some sexually explicit testimony in this one. Listener discretion is advised. You remember Hulk Hogan, many might argue, the most popular professional wrestler of all time, big and burly with long blond hair and his signature handlebar mustache caricature of the all-American tough guy. Perhaps the one man who made the World Wrestling Federation into a household name in the 1980s, Hulk Hogan, he broke. What do? But today, Hulk's prominence has all but vanished. It's rare, particularly in the 21st century, that the long retired Hogan makes his way into national news coverage. It's even more rare and perhaps unthinkable that national news coverage might discuss the importance of, how should I say, the size of Hulk Hogan's member? But that's exactly what happened on March 8th, 2016 in a civil trial. An attorney questioned him about his comments on a popular radio show. Did you hear the discussion about the length of your penis? Did you? I heard, I heard of a while, but I don't know if I read the whole thing because I couldn't understand everything. I did hear numbers all, but I heard two thirds and I compared it to hands and feet and figured it out. I heard that part. Believe it or not, that topic played a role in one of the most important press freedom cases of the last half century. The case involved the once prominent, scrappy celebrity gossip website Gawker.com, run by Gawker Media. Hogan alleged that the website had gone too far when it released video of a sex tape between himself and his close friend's wife. But beyond the salaciousness of the video and the topics it brought to light, the case would expose a lot about the nature of online media and the power of those with money. And it would reveal the lengths to which Hogan and one very powerful billionaire with an eye for revenge and who funded Hogan's case would go to destroy an enemy. This is Jillian and will cover at all in today's episode of Civil. Part one. Revenge. Hulk Hogan's case against Gawker Media is complicated with lots of characters and connections to people you'd never think would be involved. There's a lot to get to and it begins all the way back in 2004 with a man named Peter Thiel. You might recognize the name. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Teale moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area as an infant. After graduating from Stanford with a philosophy degree and then a law degree, he worked as a judicial law clerk before moving to Silicon Valley and starting a capital management company. In 1998, Teal co-founded PayPal and acted as its chief executive officer in 2002. eBay purchased PayPal for more than one five billion dollars that made Thiel immediately wealthy. And if that weren't enough, he then took some of his wealth and invested in in a little website called the Facebook when it was just a kernel of an idea. When Facebook grew into the international social media Goliath that it is today, Thiel's fate was set. He was a billionaire. He had the kind of money that could accomplish just about anything. Please welcome the co-founder of PayPal and first investor and Facebook entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Thiel's wealth made him a public figure, someone who people paid attention to, what would he invest in next? What would he do with all that money and media organizations around the world wondered, Who is Peter Thiel, really? Enter Gawker Media. Gawker Media was founded in New York City by British entrepreneur Nick Denton. It was essentially like a 21st century version of London's no holds barred newspaper tabloids. Gawker took a snarky, sarcastic and often caustic approach towards covering powerful people. Among them Peter Thiel. On December 19th, 2007, Gawker published a story with the headline Peter Thiel is totally gay people. The story wasn't seemingly malicious. At just 400 words long, it was a commentary by a gay writer about how venture capitalists in Silicon Valley approach the LGBTQ community. It even ended with the author reflecting that if Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world is gay, then more power to him. But the article irked Teal, infuriated him, even while Teal had come out to friends and had long been rumored in Silicon Valley to be gay. He told friends and journalists afterwards that the article outed him without his consent. To confirm this, in 2009, Teal described Valley Wag Gawker's website specifically covering powerful people in Silicon Valley as being staffed by terrorists, not writers or reporters. He went on. I don't understand the psychology of people who would kill themselves and blow up buildings, and I don't understand people who would spend their lives being angry. Teil didn't see Gawker as performing public service journalism. To him, it was just angry people gawking and spouting off. And Teal wasn't Gawker's only target on October 4th, 2012. Gawker published video clips that showed Hulk Hogan real name Terry Bollea, engaged in sexual intercourse. That's right. Gawker published parts of a Hulk Hogan sex tape, and the tape wasn't just Hogan having sex with some random person. It was Hogan having sex with Heather Clem, the wife of his best friend, Todd Alan Clem, the popular radio shock jock known as Bubba the Love Sponge. Why publish that, the former Gawker editor Age Alario explained, because the internet has made it easier for all of us to be shameless, voyeurs and deviants. We love to watch famous people have sex. We watch this footage because it's something we're not supposed to see. The day after Gawker published the video clips, Hogan's attorney, David Houston, demanded that Gawker take the clips down because Hogan never consented to anyone filming him having sex. Gawker editor Nick Denton refused initially, so Hogan hired additional lawyers to prepare a lawsuit. Gawker eventually took down the post, but the dispute didn't end there. One of Hogan's new lawyers, Charles Harder, filed two lawsuits one against Bubba and Heather Clem in Florida State Court, the second in a Florida federal court against Gawker. Here's Harter describing that lawsuit against Gawker. The second lawsuit filed today, was filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. It was filed against Gawker Media and its related entities, an individual. It alleges that the defendants posted excerpts of the videotape at their web site Gawker.com, for the purpose of obtaining financial profit at the expense of Mr. Hogan and in violation of his rights of privacy. On December 5th, 2012, Carter filed paperwork to start a law firm. Insiders told Forbes magazine that it would make suing Gawker its bread and butter harder denied this to Forbes, but the threat of massive litigation and potentially many lawsuits against Gawker put the media company at a significant risk. Nick Denton decided to sell a minority stake in Gawker to a Russian billionaire, Viktor Vekselberg. Denton told various media outlets that the reason for the sale was the outrageous cost of defending against the Hogan lawsuit. Hulk Hogan may have been a huge star in the 1980s, but these lawsuits were expensive and involved expensive attorneys. Media outlets began to speculate about whether there was someone else involved. Someone who is providing Hogan money from behind the scenes. Among the names of who might be funding the lawsuits was none other than Peter Thiel. Part two, public figure or private citizen. The wheels of justice turn slowly, even for Hulk Hogan. Nearly three years passed before his case went to trial in civil court on March seven, 2016. Hulk Hogan's case against Gawker began in a Florida State court in St. Petersburg. To put it broadly, the case revolved around Hogan's claim that Gawker invaded his privacy when it published those video clips. He asked the court for $100 million in damages. He filed suit against Gawker as a media entity, as well as personally suing Gawker CEO Nick Denton and its former editor, A.J. DeLorean. Unsurprisingly, the topics discussed in court went from a G rating to NC 17. Pretty much immediately, one of the first people to take the stand was Heather Clem, wife of Bubba the Love Sponge and the woman who appeared alongside Hogan in his sex tape. Hogan's attorney, Charles Harder, questioned Heather about the nature of her relationship with her husband, Bubba. He asked if they had sexual relations with people outside their marriage. Occasionally deliver that to that as an open relationship or another term for the purpose of. I can refer to it as an explanation Typekit. And then when you were married to a clown, did you have an open marriage? In the same context that I just described? And whether Heather and Bubba had an open relationship might seem like an irrelevant point to make in court. But the questioning soon got around to an important follow up. One about a surveillance camera installed in the Klum's home in their bedroom. In fact, we were aware that there were cameras in the house. I have been told there were cameras outside the house. I was aware of a security camera inside the home. Were you aware that there was a security camera inside the bedroom or elsewhere? While when when was that camera installed on or about the year that Julie and I moved in to the house? Why was it installed? I had told me that his attorney said it might be a good idea to have a camera in case something ever happened inside your bedroom. Correct? What was he concerned about? Long he had valuables or closet in the bedroom. Soon, the two concepts that Heather and Bubba had an open relationship and that Bubba had installed a surveillance camera in their bedroom emerged. In this next clip, the attorney refers to Hogan by his given name. Terry Bel-Air to the best of your knowledge, did Bubba Clem ever inform Mr. Vallejo that a sexual encounter that you had with him being filmed? I'm not aware of any conversation. Is it correct to say that you had nothing to do with the distribution or release of the sex video involving you and Mr. Miller? And do you have any knowledge regarding who was involved in releasing the sex video between you and Mr. Miller to media or anyone else? No. The attorney took the line of questioning to its next logical step. Do you have any knowledge regarding how Gawker came to possess the exact video? No. Hogan took the stand on the first day, testifying that the sex tapes publication had turned his world upside down. But this is where Hogan's case went from scandalous and controversial to downright bizarre when Hogan filed his case against Gawker. It was about defamation of his personal character. Hogan felt that Gawker had invaded his personal privacy and unfairly defamed him. But there was a problem with this. As a concept. American case law is clear that the First Amendment protects journalists and media outlets who publish information about so-called public figures. Public figures have been defined by the US Supreme Court as people who hold government office or have achieved some kind of special prominence in everyday affairs because they've been successful at seeking the public's attention and because they've achieved public figure status. The law allows for quite a bit of scrutiny of them. Media outlets are protected even if they publish false information about public figures, as long as they can prove that they didn't publish the false information with actual malice. That's a phrase meaning that they published false information with knowledge that it was false. Neither of these legal standards worked in Hulk Hogan's favor. Just about every American over the age of 30 and plenty younger than that knew of Hulk Hogan. They knew his mustache. They knew he was a famous, flamboyant wrestler. Hulk Hogan was clearly a public figure. Furthermore, Gawker didn't publish anything false about Hogan. On the contrary, they had video to prove that a story about him. One about him having sex with his best friend's wife was true. So Hogan and his attorneys came up with another approach. They would argue that Hulk Hogan and Terry Bollea, the person identified on Hogan's passport and driver's license and bank statements, were in fact two different people altogether. And while Hulk Hogan may have been a public figure, Terry Bollea was not terrible. Leo was a private figure, and by law, since Terry Bollea hadn't invited attention or scrutiny, publishing a sex tape about that person wasn't protected by the First Amendment. Here's Hogan's attorney, Charles Harder questioning him. You certainly have accepted the fact that you not that you've lost anonymity as the character Hulk Hogan, right? Yes, sir. That's part of the deal. Hulk Hogan, you lose your anonymity. On March 7th, 2016, they discussed the difference between Hulk Hogan and Terry Bel-Air, which is to tell the jury a little bit about who Terry Bellator's as that person differs from the character Hulk. Well, terrible as a normal person. Wrestling is his job is what a Hulk terribly does for a living. I don't argue. I'm not loud, very soft. Spoken to a fault. I don't know how to really say no, even though I'm learning how to say no to my kids. Sometimes I've been a forward saying yes, I probably should have said no. But it's much harder. Hulk Hogan is completely opposite of terrible. The only similar aged me are maybe sometimes the look, you know, and for different reasons. I wear a bandana on my head. His whole point is that he established the look, and sometimes I sometimes will wear a bandana. As Jerry Boyle harder wanted to know more about Terry's bandana. Why would the person that you are a person who grew up on the docks and all that? Why does that person wear a bandana as opposed to Hulk Hogan? Well, it's the kind of goes back to everything I understand now about kind of like when I was growing up, I didn't want to take my shirt off. You know, I had a real problem with taking my shirt off, even though we lived in Missouri because I wasn't in good shape. And when I was married, there was the normal when I was married to my first wife. There were the normal things that would go back and forth for you that you'd have, and sometimes I would hear, you know, too old to slow you to call her, you know? You know, like to get somebody to find somebody younger in the ball. Her thing kind of hit me because as I've gotten older, my hair has gone way far down. I've got a really large head. And so sometimes when I wear a bandana, it's terrible. It's just because it's like a soft self-confidence thing where if I don't have a Band-Aid on it, it's hard not to look at, you know, I'm all alone up there, my head. It's too loud, something large. It's a it's like a confidence thing or it's a personal thing. I guess that's the best way I can describe it. The whole hogan whole. It's different because the Hogan and I wear the bandana that's part of the wardrobe person I do, and I get to the rings. I rip them down off and on characters' whole, going totally different, you know, because I'm out in the zone as whole. This is where the exaggerated size of Hogan's penis versus cherries came into play. Let me ask you this just let's see if we can simplify this. Do you have any doubt that you sit in that witness stand today that you were discussing the length of your penis on HBO's radio program? Any day? Well, not mine, because mine is in that size. But we were discussing moving the whole focus seriously. So, you know, so I do not have an excuse. No, I do not serve. Then the testimony got to when Hogan, Bubba and Heather began discussing sex. Can you tell the jury how that started when they first started talking to you about it? I remember when I was approached, it was a phone call, and to the best of my recollection, I don't have a word together in a car. And what I asked, you know, on whether you told me, who do you want to call as a joke? Because that was a man whose dog? Just joking around was a friendly joke, and he would say, Hey, who? The other says she wants to see you naked or only wants to have sex with you, or Heather wants to see the size of your penis, which started out like that. You know where it was kind of like joking around, but it was. It caught me off guard. You know, it's very weird because I had never been approached like that and all the time I knew him, you know, and I've been around him a lot in my environments, and I just was not. He caught me off guard when he first approached me. According to Hogan, the whole reason why he decided to have sex with Heather in the. First place was because of his feelings of inadequacy about being Terry Bollea, the private individual Hulk Hogan may have been a universal caricature of the all-American tough guy, but polio was just a man, a man who was depressed, who needed an ego boost. Tell the jury how it happened the first time you actually had sexual relations with another woman. It was. Situation where a lot of things are happening at the same time, I tried unsuccessfully to get my wife to come back and she verbally over and over and over would say, If you go after you, I'm not coming back too old to slow you. Don't turn me on, I'm gonna find somebody younger. It was constantly being said to me and it just got to the point where you almost run. You know, I was just it was like a low point in my life that when Bob says, Hey man, over to the house, you know, let's talk. You know, I was just so desperate. I went over there. One thing led to another I just let my guard down. I thought, like, those people cared about me. I felt like a bottom dollar felt like you just gave up or just gave up, gave in. Let my guard down. And we just happened to hear Hogan or Bola tell it sucks with Heather became a kind of respite for him. His relationship with her, even though they only had sex three times, according to his testimony, comforted him, made him feel like a better man. It was therapeutic. It was the only place that actually felt safe, as crazy as that sounds. Those people may probably use my dust from those people maybe thought they love me. And as weird as it felt, as crazy as it sounds at that time, it just was going on. And it was just it didn't make sense, but it just happened. As Hogan described it at trial, years would pass before he would ever hear anything about a sex tape, and it wasn't Gawker that first approached him. It was the celebrity gossip site TMZ, and at the time they didn't have an actual video. They and other similar sites only had screenshots. While Hogan contacted one of his attorneys at the time, he didn't file any legal action. Enter Gawker Media. Other celebrity news outlets had seen and had access to the entire video that Bubba had filmed between his wife and Hogan. But they didn't publish it. Gawker CEO Nick Denton saw an opportunity. Knowledge of the video was in the public realm. Why shouldn't Gawker publish actual clips from the video itself? As Denton described it in trial on March 15th, 2016, it came down to the public's right to know information about a clearly public figure. Mr. Denton will ask you this Do you think that the public's right to know is as important as a public figures privacy? I think it's a balance. But ultimately, I think the public's right to know usually trumps the celebrity's privacy or agree. Do you think the public, the public should know a great deal about public officials and public figures? Yes, I do. Do you believe, as the publisher of Gawker, you believe that there are still too many stories out there that insiders, including journalists, keep within their elite circles? I think it's a lot better now than it was. But yes, there are many stories that are untold or only partially evolved. While the Hogan sex tape was indeed salacious, Denton explained that his decision to publish the video came down to Gawker sense of journalistic ethics. I think the distinguishing feature of us is that we focus on the core objectives of journalism, which is to get it right and to make a point. No, no, no, no. We agree a couple of seconds for the United States to a group of right. I was seeking not to hold ourselves up as being the noble purveyors of the truth. We write stories that a lot of people think of as being controversial, and I didn't want to be too pompous. When you talk about your competitors, the ones you look at her Twitter, Tumblr and other information networks as being a larger threat to your existence than a direct competitor like us, right? I think that's true for all media companies, yes. Ultimately, Denton's explanation didn't persuade a jury. On March 18th, 2016, the Florida jury found Hogan's claims persuasive. They awarded him a $115 million judgment finding that Gawker had invaded Hogan's privacy with punitive damages. The total rose to 140 million caricature of the all-American tough guy, and the world's best known professional wrestler had successfully argued that he was a private figure. But many asked whether he would have been able to make this argument without help from a much more powerful figure. The billionaire Peter Thiel. Part three. The end of Gawker. After Hulk Hogan's win against Gawker Media, his lawyer, Charles Harder, published a column in The Hollywood Reporter. He wrote that the case should send a message to irresponsible websites. Think twice before you invade someone's privacy or violate their rights. Harder didn't stop there. He filed another lawsuit on Hogan's behalf against Gawker alleging extortion around the sex tape. This case didn't garner the same attention as the initial one, largely because both Gawker and Nick Denton filed for bankruptcy protection in the wake of the massive judgment against them. But Harter continued his crusade. While the Hogan lawsuit was the most prominent of them, Harder filed at least five defamation cases against Gawker. Those included one by the husband of Fran Drescher and another representing a journalist who went to incredible lengths to dig up dirt on a Tinder executive. All the while, rumors swirled around how harder and Hogan had been able to mount such a strong attack against the media company. Hogan was rich and so was harder, especially after the judgment against Gawker. But were they rich enough to bootstrap a series of legal cases, likely costing in the tens of millions of dollars just to bankrupt a website? In May 2016, the New York Times reported that Peter Thiel had funded Hogan's in Hadas Crusade against Gawker, Tale told the Times that after Gawker had published the article outing him, he saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people, even when there was no connection with the public interest. He said he decided to help Hogan because they usually attack less prominent and less wealthy people who can't defend themselves. He pointed out that even though Hogan was a famous and successful millionaire, he still didn't have the resources to do it alone. Geale also added that funding the Hogan case was one of the greater philanthropic things that I've done. He admitted to spending roughly $10 million on it. Nick Denton, Dockers founder and CEO, responded to the news on CBS This Morning. Did you know Peter Teal was involved in this case? And when you found out, Nick, what did you think? We had some suspicions, but it seemed crazy like the idea that there would be somebody behind this, that there would be some long standing plan that somebody would be spending $10 million, maybe more than $10 million funding a hole, looking for cases, funding a whole series of cases against the media company because they didn't like critical coverage. Later, in an open letter to Teal, Denton asked Is your goal to bankrupt buy or wound Gawker Media if you were to own the company after a final judgment in the Hogan case? What would your editorial strategy be? In October 2016, Teal spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, in front of a roomful of journalists. He didn't answer Denton's questions directly, but he offered some explanations for his decisions. Do you believe you've set a dangerous precedent in secretly suing Gawker in connection with its publication of the Hulk Hogan? VIDEO? And are you engaged in any other lawsuits? But let's start with that precedent. Is that a dangerous precedent to set? I don't. I don't. I don't think so. You know, let's start with, you know, the facts of the case. It involved a sex tape. You know, if you if you make a sex tape of someone with their permission, you are a pornographer. If you make a sex tape without their permission, we were told now you are a journalist. I would submit that is an insult to all journalists. This is not about the First Amendment. It's it is about the most egregious violation of of privacy imaginable. Publishing a sex tape surreptitiously filmed in the privacy of someone's bedroom till went further, eventually describing the moment when he decided to go forward with funding the Hogan lawsuit. You had a feud with Gawker for more than a decade, as I said in my introduction. Why did you decide that funding another person's lawsuit would be the best course of action to take down Gawker? And when did you set this? In my initial view, was that what you were supposed to do was you were supposed to take your beatings, crouched down, go into a fetal position and then hope they moved on to somebody else and and sort of around 20, 2011. One of my friends convinced me that that if if Gawker could get away with this sort of sociopathic repeat behavior over and over, it was this tragedy of the Commons. Nobody, nobody would ever, you know, they would continue to ruin lives one after another. And there were many people that did things too far worse than me. And and so, you know, I was convinced that if I didn't do something, nobody would. In the midst of bankruptcy proceedings, Univision Communications purchased Gawker for $135 million in August 2016. The company's chief digital officer soon announced that Gawker would shut down permanently. There's a host of ironies in this swirl of chaos that emerged from Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media to name one. Gawker was just one provocative gossip website, and the case certainly did nothing to stop similar websites from publishing scandalous or even false information to name another. After all, the proceedings were done and settled. None other than Peter Thiel offered to purchase Gawker Media, though he failed. In July 2018, Gawker.com was purchased by the owner of Bustle and Elite Daily in a bankruptcy auction for a little over a million dollars. The website, relaunched in July 2021 under the Bustle Digital Group and with a new editing team. But I think it's pretty safe to say Gawker.com will likely never be the same as it once was. This episode was researched by Nicole Gus Moratti and written by Matt Stroud, edited and narrated by me, Jillian Jalali, original music scoring and editing by Corey Helpmann. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Civil. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you're new to Seville and have never heard about my other podcast court junkie, please check that out too. That one covers criminal cases and trials, and so far there are more than 200 episodes available. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.
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