It's been 10 years since Hulk Hogan and Heather Cole, who was married to radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem at the time, made a sex tape, but the legal issues between the former WWE superstar and gossip news site Gawker are still going on.
Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Boella, sued Gawker in October 2012 after the site published a 1-minute and 41-second long excerpt from the racy video as he believed his privacy was violated. His initial efforts to take legal action were shut down by a federal judge who ruled the website's actions were "in conjunction with the news reporting function" and that the clip was legitimate news for the website as he had openly talked about his sex life in the past. Now, nearly four years later, Hogan plans to take Gawker to court once and for all.
The 62-year-old ex-wrestler is seeking $100 million from Gawker for publishing the video of him and Cole and then refusing to take it down. It is still unclear how the video got to the site in the first place as it was received anonymously.
The ongoing legal battle is set to officially make its way to trial beginning Monday, March 7, in St. Petersburg, Fla. The jury will be selected sometime this week. Hogan's attorney Charles Harder compared this case and his client to Erin Andrews, who is the sportscaster and "DWTS" host currently involved in her own legal battles in court over a secret nude video that a stalker recorded of her through the peephole of a hotel room.
"What's interesting is that I get this sense that the public and media are so in favor of Erin Andrews," Harder told CNN Money. "But for some reason, Hulk Hogan gets treated in a different way."
Gawker's defense team is relying heavily on the First Amendment, claiming the publication of the video was strictly for the purpose of a news story since Hogan was public about his sexual exploits, but Harder said the sit has been "outrageous from day one."
"Gawker is allowed to join that very public conversation without getting sued for tens of millions of dollars simply because Hogan didn't like the way Gawker did so," explained Gawker attorney Seth Berlin. "Public figures and celebrities don't get to use the court system to punish speech about them that they don't like. That's just not the country we live in."
During the trial, there will be testimony from Gawker Media founder Nick Denton and former editor-in-chief A.J. Daulerio, who posted the footage to the site, as both are named as defendants along with the company. Even though the footage was eventually removed under court order in 2013, Daulerio's commentary is still there and currently has more than six million page views. Despite Hogan's determination after all these years, Denton and his legal team are confident they can win this.
"I never actually used to like to wrap myself in the flag and the First Amendment. It felt a little bit presumptuous to claim the privileges of the press when often we criticize the press ourselves," said Denton last week. "But we are the press, we are journalists, we rely on the defense of the First Amendment."
