![]() “So we are confident we will win this case ultimately based on not only on the law but also on the truth. “There is so much this jury deserved to know and, fortunately, that the appeals court does indeed know,” the statement went on. “We expect that to happen again - particularly because the jury was prohibited from knowing about these court rulings in favor of Gawker, prohibited from seeing critical evidence gathered by the FBI and prohibited from hearing from the most important witness, Bubba Clem.” “Soon after Hulk Hogan brought his original lawsuits in 2012, three state appeals court judges and a federal judge repeatedly ruled that Gawker’s post was newsworthy under the First Amendment,” Heather Dietrick, president & general counsel of Gawker Media, said in a statement shortly after the verdict was revealed. Gawker has indicated that it intends to appeal the massive damages. After being posted on Gawker, it was viewed 2.5 million times. Follow him on Twitter: The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, claimed that the video was recorded in secret. Randazza is a Las Vegas-based First Amendment attorney and managing partner of the Randazza Legal Group. If the media can’t behave responsibly when it comes to privacy, it may find that there are more Peter Theils and more Hulk Hogan juries out there willing to force them to do so.Īnd in the end, none of us can have nice things. But, perhaps that gets us back to the second maxim I began with: “That’s why we can’t have nice things.” Rather than Thiel being the bad guy here for financing an invasion of privacy suit, we ought to realize that any fingerprint stains on the First Amendment in this case come from Gawker When it comes to the First Amendment, that isn’t supposed to matter. But are its wounds really received in an honorable battle? Gawker is not publishing the Pentagon Papers or the Panama Papers. A jury, swayed by Team Hogan’s argument that the media ought to distinguish between Hulk Hogan the public figure and Terry Bollea the private citizen, awarded the plaintiff 140 million in. Of course, in the end, maybe the press suffers. But, when we look at what got Gawker here in the first place – outing a man who hadn’t yet decided to come out, posting a sex tape, we perhaps realize that maybe the real fight here is about privacy, and not freedom of the press. Gawker is the media, and thus I reflexively find myself defending it. ![]() Are Thiel’s actions ushering in a new era of censorship? I think not any worse than we’ve suffered already. It is true that outside litigation financing might have been wrong at one time, but it has become normal. Thiel had the right to choose how and when he came out as gay, and Gawker took that away from him. Remember, his vengeance is not aimed at Gawker for writing a mean opinion about him, it is for invading his privacy. Is that a contradiction? Perhaps, if you look at the world from a lazy, binary, point of view.īut, from another point of view, Thiel is willing to do what it takes to protect what little privacy we have left. Is Thiel really a free speech bully out to destroy the media? He has, in the past, also funded the Committee to Protect Journalists. Because there is another way to look at this. Perhaps passing the collection basket to protect free speech seems, on the surface, more noble than a lone billionaire exacting payback on a media site. The decision by a Florida jury to grant 140 million in damages for a story on about a Hulk Hogan sex tape was extraordinary. What to do? We have often turned to “crowdfunding” platforms or benefactors to raise legal defense funds. He had charisma, but not as much as Randy Savage did. Hulk Hogan has settled with Gawker for 31 million, plus Gawker’s agreement to remove the sex materials from its website that were the subject of the hard-fought invasion of privacy suit. It was always punch, Hulk Up, Big Boot, Leg Drop, even with the rare occasions where he does something different, its always looked sloppy. In my practice, when I am defending someone’s free speech rights - say, a poor defendant – I am often confronted with a well-funded, censorship-minded individual on the other side. Hogan was a tolerable in-ring worker at best that had nearly zero interesting or unique qualities in a match. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |