Hogan and Bubba, longtime friends, bonded over the controversy, and the wrestler made many appearances on Bubba’s show. Nick’s responsibility (or lack thereof) for the crash became a controversial subject in Tampa, and Bubba Clem, a popular local radio personality who had legally changed his name to the Love Sponge, defended Nick on his program. In the summer of 2007, Nick Hogan was the driver in a car accident in which a passenger was grievously injured. (Hulk and Linda’s marriage was troubled, and in later seasons the show’s cameras followed them into their counselling sessions.) His fame grew when he starred, for four seasons, in a reality-television show that chronicled life in the Tampa mansion that he shared with his wife, Linda, and their two children-Brooke, an aspiring singer, and Nick, a teen-ager. At six feet seven, with a trademark yellow-and-red bandanna and white horseshoe mustache, Hogan became a pop-cultural phenomenon, instantly recognizable even to non-wrestling fans. He grew up in a tough section of Tampa and toiled for years in wrestling obscurity under a variety of stage names, including Terry Boulder, the Super Destroyer, and Sterling Golden, before he became a star as Hulk Hogan, in the nineteen-eighties. And on both occasions that man won a convincing and consequential victory. In both, a wealthy and successful man played the victim. In both contests, a star of reality television who initially became famous in another field portrayed himself as an embattled outsider confronting an unaccountable élite. Gawker in the courtroom looks in some ways like a dress rehearsal for Trump v. Pointing to the journalists, Trump would call them “disgusting reporters,” “horrible people,” and “scum.” As President-elect, he has used his platform and his Twitter feed to tap a deep reservoir of cultural resentment against, among others, flag burners, the cast of “Hamilton,” and the staff of the Times. At rallies, he used the people inside the penned press enclosures as foils and targets. On the campaign trail, Trump turned contempt for the media into a central part of his quest for the Presidency.
Although for years Hogan had honed an image of himself as a lovably egomaniacal celebrity, his Tampa lawyers successfully presented him as a rugged Everyman who was victimized by a group of privileged snobs. The courtroom battle took place as Donald Trump’s candidacy for President was accelerating, and it drew on some of the same political forces.
The Hogan case had another dimension that was equally ominous for media organizations. The prospect of liability, perhaps existential in nature, for true stories presents a chilling risk for those who rely on the First Amendment. Hulk Hogan conceded that Gawker’s story about him was true, yet he still won a vast judgment and, not incidentally, drove the Web site out of business. But, in an age when Internet publishers can, with a few clicks, distribute revenge porn, medical records, and sex tapes-all of it truthful and accurate-courts are having second thoughts about guaranteeing First Amendment protection. In these cases, the Court came close to saying, but never quite said, that publication of the truth was always protected by the First Amendment. Since the nineteen-sixties, a series of Supreme Court precedents, most of them involving newspapers, have made libel cases very difficult to win, in part because plaintiffs bear the burden of proving that the stories about them are false. The verdict heralds a new era, in which judges and jurors see the ribald world of the Internet, rather than the staid realm of newspapers, as the dominant form of journalism. (Hogan, who is now sixty-three, prefers to characterize wrestling as “sports entertainment,” because promoters stage matches in advance.) Even after the jury’s verdict-a gargantuan award of a hundred and forty million dollars, in Hogan’s favor-few saw the case as anything more than a bizarre outlier, of little relevance to anyone except its protagonists.īut the lawsuit seems destined to have an enduring afterlife, and not just because of the revelation that it had been secretly financed by a tech billionaire with a vendetta against Gawker. Petersburg in March, laid out a sordid tale of betrayal and exposure, told mostly by Hogan, whose lavishly mustachioed visage remains one of the prominent faces of the sport of pro wrestling. After all, the case centered on the leak of a surreptitiously videotaped sexual encounter between Hogan, the professional wrestler, and the wife of his erstwhile best friend, who is named Bubba the Love Sponge. When Hulk Hogan faced off in court against the Web site Gawker, earlier this year, it was easy to become distracted by the rococo tawdriness of the spectacle.
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