Terry Gene Bollea, better known by his stage name, Hulk Hogan, died Thursday at the age of 71. For wrestling fans, he will be remembered as the man who, along with Vince McMahon, was responsible for turning professional wrestling into a popular mainstream sport and a franchise worth billions. But for many journalists, Mr. Hogan’s legacy is altogether less impressive.
He was fired from World Wrestling Entertainment for using the N-word repeatedly on tape and he used slurs to describe gay people. He prevented his colleagues from unionizing. His ex-wife and daughter have described him as physically and emotionally abusive. Most relevant to me, he sued Gawker, a news and entertainment site that I co-founded in 2002, because its editor published a clip from a tape that featured him having sex with his friend’s wife.
The lawsuit, to be clear, was not important because Gawker was important. Gawker was largely an entertainment site that, on its best days, reported presciently about powerful people behaving badly. The site published stories about the alleged sexual misconduct of many celebrities long before the #MeToo movement, and published Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book way back in 2015. It could also be frivolous, crass, and even mean, which often rankled the powerful people it covered. But journalists’ frivolity, vulgarity and snark all happen to be protected by the First Amendment, as long as what they write is truthful. Only there is an exception to that: When someone sues for invasion of privacy, the truth is no longer a defense. And that is what Mr. Hogan and his allies cynically exploited.
Because that sex tape was undeniably Mr. Hogan, he could not sue Gawker for defamation and win. But Gawker had made plenty of powerful people angry in its day, one of whom was the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. (A Gawker site had outed Mr. Thiel as gay in 2007 and later reported that his hedge fund had gone into free fall. Again, truthful.) What Mr. Thiel recognized then was that someone with deep pockets can try to drown an outlet in legal fees and make truth legally irrelevant by suing for invasion of privacy.
