“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” Thiel told The New York Times shortly after Forbes unmasked him. WWE, where Hogan had been a star for decades, quickly cut ties. Hogan emerged victorious, but not unscathed before the trial, the transcript of a second sex tape leaked, revealing the wrestler’s repeated use of some very ugly racial slurs. Its founder Nick Denton sold his company off to Univision, which quickly shuttered the embattled flagship site (it continues to run sister sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo). The verdict drove Gawker media into immediate bankruptcy. 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 damages. Daulerio, who, in a deposition, sarcastically joked that the only celebrity sex tape he wouldn’t consider newsworthy would be one featuring a preschooler-the wrestler prevailed.
But with the hometown advantage and an unusually sympathetic judge-and in light of a major blunder from Gawker editor in chief A.J. By the time he filed his case in a Pinellas County, Florida, civil court, Hogan had already hit roadblocks in federal court, and victory seemed like a long shot. Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, and the guy who long hoped to build an offshore Valhalla for libertarians, funded the litigation as part of a concerted effort to punish Gawker, which had both publicly outed him as gay and gleefully reported on the travails of his now-defunct hedge fund, Clarium Capital. Last May Forbes broke the news that billionaire Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel had surreptitiously bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s winning lawsuit against Gawker, the site that in 2012 published a snippet of a leaked sex tape depicting the wrestler (né Terry Bollea) in flagrante delicto with Heather Clem, then the wife of his best friend, radio shock jockey Bubba the Love Sponge (who, for the record, and to make things even more complicated, seems to have endorsed the affair).
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