How Hulk Hogan's sex tape lawsuit bankrupted media company Gawker

Indian Express

25-07-2025

Hulk Hogan's victory against Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania III in 1987 has long been considered the greatest of his wrestling career. But as influential as body slamming the 500-pound Giant was, in real life terms, it pales in comparison to the impact of Hogan's civil suit against Gawker for publishing a video of him having sex with his best friend's wife.
Here's what happened, including the role of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Hogan, 71, died on Thursday (July 25).
An unsavoury video
Gawker was a news and gossip website founded by Nick Denton in 2002 with the goal of 'being a snarky insidery blog with a focus on New York City and a long satirical streak,' according to an article by The New York Times.
Over the years, Gawker developed a reputation for publishing provocative content, which frequently violated copyrights and privacy, or was illegally obtained. It was one such video that would lead to its eventual downfall.
In 2007, Gawker obtained a copy of a secretly recorded sex tape, which featured Hulk Hogan having sex with Heather Clem, the wife of his then-best friend, radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Bubba had himself filmed the video in secret but it is yet unclear how the video was leaked to Gawker.
In 2012, after Gawker published nine seconds of sexually-explicit footage, Hogan, born Terry Gene Bollea, filed a $100 million civil lawsuit against the outlet.
Hogan claimed that the sex tape was filmed without his consent even though the encounter itself was consensual. He even told radio host Howard Stern that the coupling received 'Bubba Clem's blessing'. Hogan would testify in court: 'I was depressed. I gave up and gave in. I felt that those people loved me.'
Hogan's case was simple: his lawyers argued that Gawker grossly violated his privacy and that publishing the video did not serve any news purpose.
'To him the privacy part of it was integral. It was important,' Hogan's lead trial attorney, Ken Turkel, told the Associated Press. 'Eight-year-old kids were googling 'Hulk Hogan' and 'Wrestlemania,' and they were getting a sex tape. That was hurtful to him in a real personal way.'
Gawker's counsel, on the other hand, argued that the footage is newsworthy and protected by the First Amendment, and that Hogan should not have had an expectation of privacy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution essentially protects the freedom of speech.
Legally speaking, the case pitted the First Amendment against the privacy rights of celebrities — an issue on which courts had hitherto leaned towards the former.
A landmark verdict
This is why Bollea v. Gawker is a landmark verdict. With the jury rejecting Gawker's First Amendment arguments and awarding Hogan a whopping $141 million, a precedent was set for celebrities to be able to persuade a jury that their right to privacy outweighs the freedom of the press — even when the published material was true.
'Now more people, including judges, understand that it's possible to sue someone for revealing something truthful, as long as that something is deeply personal and its publication is highly offensive,' Amy Gajda, a Brooklyn Law School professor, told the AP.
The verdict effectively made such cases about establishing the 'news value' of publishing any content. 'As long as there is news value in what is published and the media can argue that effectively, they can get a privacy case dismissed very early on,' Gajda said.
Many experts have said that the verdict in Bollea v. Gawker has sparked a trend of libel and privacy lawsuits being weaponised against media organisations, including recent cases against Wall Street Journal, ABC and CBS by US President Donald Trump.
Behind the scenes of the case was Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor, seemingly hell-bent on destroying Gawker out of a deep personal grudge.
In May 2016, two months after the verdict, Forbes reported that Hogan's entire lawsuit which bankrupted Gawker was funded fully by Thiel. His motivation: a 2007 blogpost on Gawker titled 'Peter Thield is totally gay, people'.
The article was irreverently, some would say tastelessly, commendatory of Thiel, with lines like:
'…Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has no way to fit into the old establishment…'
'I think it's important to say this: Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay. More power to him.'
For Thiel, being outed like that was humiliating. He privately plotted revenge, setting up a legal fund that was essentially meant to sue Gawker into oblivion. When the Hogan sex tape dropped in 2012, Thiel's team reached out to the wrestler and indicated that the billionaire was willing to bankroll a massive civil suit.
Hogan then filed a $100 million suit. Notably, he refused to settle, as is usual, insisting on taking the matter to court. One legal analyst notably wrote in a blog in early 2016, 'Might a Gawker Hater be Covering Hulk Hogan's Legal Bills?' But Gawker did not recognise Thiel's involvement till it was too late.
Ultimately, Thiel's resources were central to why Hogan won the case. Thiel would later tell The NYT that taking down Gawker was 'one of [the] greater philanthropic things that [he had] done'.