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.
DONALD TRUMP GAWKER PRO
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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