Hulk Hogan is suing Gawker Media (again)
Fresh off Hulk Hogan’s $140 million courtroom victory against Gawker Media in March, the retired pro wrestler is leveling another legal challenge at the company.
In a 65-page court filing made today (and available at the bottom of this post), Hogan says that Gawker Media leaked to the National Enquirer now-notorious recordings of Hogan saying extremely racist stuff, thereby destroying the one-time reality TV star’s reputation and costing him hefty sums of money. After the Enquirer and tabloid Radar Online published transcripts of Hogan’s remarks (which included multiple invocations of the n-word), World Wrestling Entertainment quickly cut ties with him.
Previously, Hogan successfully sued Gawker Media, CEO Nick Denton and then-Gawker.com editor AJ Daulerio for invading his privacy by publishing a sex tape of Hogan in 2012. Though the jury sided with Hogan, awarding $140 million in total damages, the case is widely expected to be overturned by an appellate court.
Now, Hogan isn’t just going after Gawker. He’s also suing two separate groups of people (mostly lawyers and radio personalities) for conspiring to leak the recordings as well. Hogan’s legal team alleges that Gawker sued the FBI for access to the racist recordings, which were part of an FBI investigation into a sex tape blackmail racket in which Hogan was the victim. Hogan’s team additionally claims that Gawker did this in order to get the racist recordings out into the public and destroy Hogan’s reputation.
The filing, which was made in the same district court as Hogan’s previous suit against Gawker, does not specify the amount in damages that Hogan (real name Terry Bollea) is seeking. Over email, his rep Elizabeth Traub told Re/code that “Any damages sought will be argued to the jury.”
“Mr. Bollea said from the beginning that he would seek to hold all persons and entities fully responsible for their wrongful actions,” the Bollea legal team said in a statement provided by Traub. “This lawsuit seeks to do just that.”
In a statement, Gawker Media accused Hogan of “abusing the court system to control his public image.”
“It was absurd enough that Hulk Hogan claimed $100m for emotional distress and economic damage for a story about a sex life that he’d already made public,” the statement reads. “Now Hulk Hogan is blaming Gawker for racist remarks he made on another sex tape, which Gawker never had. As we’ve said before and are happy to say again: Gawker did not leak the information.”
The New York Post first reported the news of Hogan’s new suit against Gawker.
Update: On page 51 of the filing, which is a transcript of a conversation between Hogan and current defendant and alleged Hogan blackmailer Keith Davidson, Davidson says that he heard Bubba “the Love Sponge” Clem and his wife Heather Clem, the woman in the Hogan sex tape, met someone named “Petraeus at a swingers party and it is rumored they have video.”
It is unclear who “Petraeus” is or what the specific video is, but the conversation suggests that it is another compromising tape of Hogan. One possibility is that the “Petraeus” referred to in the filing is disgraced former CIA chief David Petraeus, whom NBC News previously linked to Bubba Clem through Florida socialite Jill Kelley. Clem first posted transcripts of this conversation on his website this past November, claiming that it was proof that a former employee of his, not Clem, was responsible for the tapes’s leak.