How Hogan chokeslammed journalism – and democracy

* Terry Gene Bollea, better known by his stage name, Hulk Hogan, died last week 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, 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 unionising. 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 allegations of sexual misconduct by 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 Hogan and his allies cynically exploited.

Because that sex tape was undeniably Hogan, he could not sue Gawker for defamation and win. But Gawker made plenty of powerful people angry in its day, one of whom was the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. (A Gawker site outed Thiel as gay in 2007 and later reported that his hedge fund had gone into free fall. Again, truthful.) What Thiel recognised 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.

Thiel funded Hogan’s suit, intending to drag Gawker in and out of court until it was bankrupted either by the cost of fighting the lawsuit or by any damages awarded. After an initial suit on the basis of copyright infringement failed in federal court, Mr. Hogan brought a second suit against the publication in state court. He found a friendly jurisdiction in his hometown, Tampa, where he sued Gawker for invasion of privacy. There, Hogan won his case. The jury awarded him damages of $140 million; Gawker ultimately settled for $31 million. A cocktail of bad luck and an angry billionaire resulted in an industry-defining judgment. Gawker did not have the money left to put up the $50 million bond needed to appeal the decision.

The suit ultimately had a chilling effect on many journalists who cover powerful people. At one point during the trial, Hogan’s lawyers successfully added individual journalists to their lawsuit. Under normal circumstances, those journalists would be indemnified by their employer. Hogan’s lawyers went after the editor AJ Daulerio personally. It left Daulerio on the hook for upward of millions of dollars that he could not possibly pay.

Even a decade and a half on, journalists were still worried that what happened at Gawker would happen to them. In 2017, I was trying to raise money for a news outlet that would, among other things, cover the business interests of the Trump family. When interviewing reporters, I was often asked whether the new outlet would be able to provide indemnification and whether the company would be adequately insured if a malicious person like Thiel decided to use the courts to destroy it. It was then and is now a legitimate concern.

Journalism, at its best, exists to hold people with power accountable for their abuse of it. It is difficult, if not impossible, to do our work if we can be bankrupted by lawsuits any time powerful people decide they don’t like how they were covered. The ability of journalists to report what needs to be reported cannot be contingent on their ability to withstand financial assaults from billionaires, especially when billionaires just have to make it prohibitively expensive for journalists to fight back, no matter how frivolous the suits.

Thiel and Hogan created a playbook for deep-pocketed people to pressure news outlets by weaponising the judicial process and threatening them with bankruptcy. Today, President Trump is suing or has threatened to sue multiple news outlets, seemingly because he didn’t like the correct, if unflattering, information they published about him. He is suing The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion because it reported that he signed a birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein and included a lewd drawing. Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, is defending its reporting and vowing to fight the lawsuit. Not all news outlets have such backbone. Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and ABC have settled suits with Trump, despite little to no evidence that they have done anything other than what the law allows.

Whatever you may think of Hulk Hogan or Gawker or Peter Thiel or Donald Trump or even outlets like The Wall Street Journal, the fact that a powerful man can so easily skirt the protections of the First Amendment is a travesty for this country. That is Hogan’s real legacy, and it is more significant than any abhorrent character trait or WWE appearance.

It was not surprising that he aligned so heavily with the MAGA movement and Trump during the last years of his life; the two men share many character traits. Most relevant here is their command of showmanship. On television, Hogan pretended to wrestle, and Trump pretended to be a successful businessman. They both benefited heavily from media coverage, courted it when that suited them and, when it didn’t, tried to shut it down. Unfortunately, Trump is still trying to do that.

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