Gawker’s owner broke his silence Tuesday after a jury awarded $140 million to Hulk Hogan in a lawsuit that was filed after the gossip website posted a sex tape that included the wrestler and a former friend’s now-ex-wife.
“The decision by a Florida jury to grant $140 million in damages for a story on Gawker.com about a Hulk Hogan sex tape was extraordinary. The number is far larger than even the plaintiff himself had asked for in relief. It’s a huge pay-day for an indiscretion that would have been quickly forgotten, one among many in the professional wrestler’s personal life,” Gawker’s Nick Denton said in a blog post Tuesday.
“The enormous size of the verdict is chilling to Gawker Media and other publishers with a tabloid streak, but it is also a flag to higher courts that this case went wildly off the rails,” he added.
He complained that Gawker was portrayed in the case as a decadent and unscrupulous gossip blog that “good and decent people should find frightening and distasteful.”
As a result, he added, the jury allowed emotion to cloud its judgment, and evidence and witnesses were, “kept from the jury.”
“A state appeals court and a federal judge have already held repeatedly that the 2012 commentary and short video excerpt, which joined an existing conversation and explored the public’s fascination with celebrity sex tapes, were newsworthy,” he wrote. “We have had our day in trial court, and we lost. We will have our day back in appeals court, and we will be vindicated.”
He maintained the case was never about emotional damages suffered with the release of the surreptitiously recorded sex tape, as many in the press have reported, but about Gawker being in possession of a tape featuring Hogan using racist language.
“Hogan filed the claim because he was terrified that one of the other tapes … might emerge,” he wrote. “[I]t is now clear that Hogan’s lawsuit was a calculated attempt to prevent Gawker, or anyone else who might obtain evidence of his racism, from publishing a truth more interesting and more damaging than a revelation about his sex life.”
A jury handed down its verdict last week awarding Hogan $115 million. On Monday, jurors awarded the wrestler an additional $25.1 million in punitive damages.
Gawker media is on the hook for $15 million, Denton must personally pay $10 million and former Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio, whose site originally posted the sex tape, owes Hogan $100,000.
The release of the video, which was reportedly recorded by the husband of Hogan’s former paramour, shock jock “Bubba the Love Sponge,” resulted later in the wrestler splitting with his wife of 25 years, Linda Hogan.
Denton’s post alleged that witnesses and vital information were barred from being presented during the lawsuit, and he suggested Hogan lied during the case to avoid revealing the truth of the matter.
“[W]e now know that the trial was a sham from the start. The real, and actually embarrassing, reason Hogan sued Gawker to begin with was hidden from the jury, from the public, and from me, while he put on a show about being violated by the publication of nine seconds of his sex life, after years of boasts about his prowess on talk radio and shows like Howard Stern,” he wrote.
“The absence of essential testimony and evidence explains why Gawker Media was found liable in this first round in the courts. It is harder to explain the immense sums awarded to compensate Hogan for his emotional distress and economic loss,” he added.
He concluded by explaining at length that Hogan, a public figure, is fair game for scrutiny, and that it’s the job of all good journalists to vet people like the wrestler whenever something newsworthy arises. He also vowed that Gawker would continue to fight Hogan’s suit in court.
