It’s the season when celebrities-who-died-this-year lists proliferate. Terry Gene Bollea—the wrestler Hulk Hogan—will make most 2025 rolls, but his legacy may be his influence over online journalism.
Bollea, who died in July, scored a 2016 courtroom triumph over Gawker Media, Nick Denton (Gawker’s founder and owner), and A.J. Daulerio (Gawker’s editor in chief). The invasion-of-privacy lawsuit centered on Gawker’s 2012 online posting of part of a video showing a naked Bollea “having sex in a bedroom with a friend’s wife.” Bollea contended the recording was made without his knowledge in a place where “he had a reasonable expectation of privacy” and that Gawker’s publication of it was “offensive and objectionable” and “not of legitimate public concern.” A Florida jury awarded Bollea $115 million in compensatory damages, with $60 million of it designated “for the emotional distress” caused by the internet posting. The case later settled for $31 million, and Gawker sold itself after filing for bankruptcy.
The case’s legacy for online journalism and privacy is complicated: Was it a magnificent victory for personal privacy over a sensationalistic, online news and entertainment organization or did it establish a template for third-party litigation funding “supporting proxy plaintiffs’ tort actions against the press” to silence journalists? People’s answers might be influenced by their: (1) political orientation; (2) views about journalists and journalism; and (3) conceptions of newsworthiness and privacy.
Reflecting on the case after Bollea’s passing, some articles and essays focused on the fact that billionaire Peter Thiel financed Bollea’s lawsuit for personal reasons because a Gawker-related publication earlier had outed Thiel as gay. A New York Times article, tellingly titled “How Hulk Hogan Leg-Dropped the Digital Media Industry,” sweepingly asserts in a sub-headline that the lawsuit “helped inspire the American right’s ongoing war on the press.” It avers that
Thiel’s success at the Gawker trial may not have ended journalism as we know it, but it has certainly emboldened his allies. Charles Harder, who represented Bollea at trial, followed up his victory with a suit against The Daily Mail on behalf of Melania Trump, and then represented President Trump himself a year later in a demand letter attempting to quash a book by the author Michael Wolff.
Elizabeth Spiers, a Gawker cofounder, took Bollea and Thiel to task in a separate New York Times piece, contending they “created a playbook for deep-pocketed people to pressure news outlets by weaponizing the judicial process and threatening them with bankruptcy.” She added that Bollea “and his allies cynically exploited” the legal theory known as public disclosure of private facts because, unlike in defamation, truth does not provide journalists with a defense against it.
Indeed, to win an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit based on this theory, a plaintiff needs to show that a defendant gave publicity (widespread dissemination) to a private fact about the plaintiff that is not newsworthy (not of legitimate public concern) and that the publicity would be highly offensive to a reasonable person in the plaintiff’s position. The jury in Bollea v. Gawker rejected Gawker’s argument that the video showing Bollea having sex was of legitimate public concern; a finding otherwise would have defeated his claim. In short, the fact that Bollea had sex with a woman outside of his marriage may have been newsworthy, but watching the contents of the tape wasn’t.
The jury also ruled for Bollea on another theory called intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED)—something I’ve addressed elsewhere. On Bollea’s IIED claim, the jurors concluded that Gawker’s posting of the video constituted extreme and outrageous conduct—it went beyond the bounds of decency in a civilized society—and that it caused Bollea severe emotional distress.
Bollea’s success on the public disclosure of private facts and IIED claims provides another lens—one beyond the Thiel-funding framework—for judging the case’s legacy. Professor Amy Gajda has asserted that Bollea v. Gawker:
Exemplifie[d] the clash between a bolder media and the privacy it can decimate. Consider this: Gawker’s founder and owner, Nick Denton, boasted in 2014 that his website routinely published private information that an ethics-abiding newspaper would not and suggested that the crowd-sourced ratting out of anyone and “spilling of secrets” including sex pictures would be healthy for most people.
Gajda dubbed Gawker a “proudly push-the-envelope news website that had decided that [the sex video of Hogan] was appropriate for excerpted but otherwise unedited viewing.” Writing elsewhere, she’s labeled Gawker’s format “quasi-journalism, an umbrella term that includes publications that publish truth while, at times, flaunting mainstream journalism’s ethical considerations.”
Viewed in this context, the jury’s verdict might be interpreted as well-justified public pushback against the notions that anything a celebrity does is newsworthy and that celebrities have no privacy rights. That it took Thiel’s money to curb the excesses of one online news and entertainment outlet, however, muddies the legacy.
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