Hulk Hogan awarded $115 million in Gawker sex tape case

[Skroe]

So they are going to be unemployed. Big fucking deal. I have little respect nor empathy for the people that ruin the profession of journalism with gossip bullshit and try to make money off of destroying other people's lives. Fuck 'em.

Indeed.

If someone as caustic, petty, and unprofessional as Hamilton Nolan never has a professional writing job again, it would be good for journalism. And he's just one example.

I just hope io9 and Foxtrot Alpha land on their feet.

[Barnabas]

I've always wondered something about big dollar judgements. Maybe you guys can help me understand.

Lets say Im Gawker, I have 100 million in the bank. How does the Hulkster get the money after he wins? What happens when I appeal the judgement? Does my 100 million get frozen, or am I free to use it until the appeals process is complete? What laws are there to stop me from using up the money before my appeal so the Hulkster cant have any?

Maybe gawker should've had some foresight before they published a video that cost hogan a marriage that cost him 30 million plus a ridiculous amount of alimony. The tapes even cost him his job he has had for 30 years. Maybe they should've thought that the lawyers aren't working for free either. Then people seem ok with publishing celebrity sex tapes. I don't even care to see any of that crap but people insist it must be socially acceptable and a thing for reasons that are beyond me.

Gawker will cry that it's financially crippling to the judge and get it reduced. They have to go by florida law in when and how the money is distributed.

[Annoying]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ogan-sex-tape/

$25m more. $15m for Gawker, and $10m from Nick Denton who was held "personally liable".

[JohnBrown1917]

They'll all prolly just declare bankruptcy and never pay out a dime.

Either way, Gawker is dead.
Also saw some people claim, that by state law, everything Gawker owns goes to Hogan if they pull that. But i'm not familiar with the laws of whatever state this took place in, so we'll see.

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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ogan-sex-tape/

$25m more. $15m for Gawker, and $10m from Nick Denton who was held "personally liable".

Nick Denton is fucked even harder.

[Rennadrel]

Without writing a wall of text (that I actually just removed), I'd like to point out that while celebrities give up privacy rights in a trade off to make money from a heightened interest in their persona and sometimes private life, they never automatically waive the right to privacy for their intimate life, which includes sex. Only a very sick mind would argue that once you become a celebrity you automatically lose the right of having sex with someone without having to fear being filmed and exposed on the internet FOR LIFE at a later point.

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So they are going to be unemployed. Big fucking deal. I have little respect nor empathy for the people that ruin the profession of journalism with gossip bullshit and try to make money off of destroying other people's lives. Fuck 'em.

I would love nothing more than to see all the celebrity gossip and trash laden magazines nuked from orbit. I mean, those fucks do nothing more than spy on people and invade their privacy. Were I any celebrity, I would be inclined to walk around with a pistol just to chase these assholes off. Pop a few of em in the kneecaps and see if they come around.

[Jinpachi]

What are you gonna do, when the hulkamania legal team runs wild on you!!!!!

[Independent voter]

that's the end of Gawker, good riddance.

[Wells]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ogan-sex-tape/

$25m more. $15m for Gawker, and $10m from Nick Denton who was held "personally liable".

This is frankly a ludicrous amount of money.

[Mister Cheese]

Good riddance. Running around for 14 fucking years saying whatever you want about whoever you want was going to bite you in the ass eventually. So many apologists for Gawker in this thread. They have abused their rights to free speech all this time. That doesn't protect them from getting sued over what they did to Hogan.

They are a website DEDICATED to smearing people's reputation and ruining lives. Why the hell does something like that need to exist? It's fucking awful. And they're huge hypocrites. Do I need to bring up Jennifer Lawrence? How they criticized the people who leaked her nudies? I think Jezebel was probably pissed off they were the ones who didn't get to do it.

[Mister Cheese]

It's interesting that you're apparently utterly incapable of distinguishing between a love of Gawker and criticism of the ruling or the award on legal or other grounds.

I never even addressed how people love Gawker. Why are you bringing that up? Also it's completely up to the jury to say yes or no to the amount that is being awarded. They gave even more money to Hogan initially. Then EVEN MORE when Gawker tried to appeal. It's really hard to sympathize with them. They dug their own grave, laid down in it and handed Hulk Hogan the shovel. And the Jury saw this.

[Mister Cheese]

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice...gainst/d15nznk

Can't be undone by bankruptcy. So in short. They're boned

Doesn't it also say in that post they can keep the appeal going as long as possible? They can drag out the case potentially forever. I'm not knowledgeable of the legal system but that's what it looks like I'm reading.

[Wells]

The thing is. What he said was said in private. GAcker then leaked it and sensationalized it. Also lots of people think these things. Even SJWS

"Said in private" doesn't mean shit if they can show its news of public interest. "Famous person is a flaming racist" is news.

[Deleted]

A horrible racist was wronged by a horrible website.

Despite the former, I'm still really glad for this. Doesn't change that he's a horrible racist though.

I cant understand this bizzare way of thinking where one tongue slip with argubably negligent effect on the most intangible of things: feelings, has supposed huge negative effect that requires discrediting said perpetrator of his years upon years of positive achivements.

It feels like its less about meeting justice but poaching on the rich and succesful in America like some angsty jealous hater.
It's just sad to watch... have people over there become some vain and empty?

[paralleluniverse]

Sorry, Hulk Hogan, the First Amendment Is on Gawker's Side

By Noah Feldman

Last week I had to defend Donald Trump’s free-speech rights. Now that a Florida jury has awarded Hulk Hogan $115 million in his suit against Gawker, I have to defend the original snark-site’s free-press right to have shown a sex tape of the retired wrestler and his erstwhile best friend’s wife. This First Amendment stuff is sometimes a serious drag.

In this area of law, unattractive speakers are par for the course. One famous precedent involved a parody of a Campari ad in Hustler in which Jerry Falwell discussed losing his virginity to his mother. (There’s even a movie about it.)

It would be great if all First Amendment defendants were publishing Ulysses. But in reality, free speech and free-press rights are especially vulnerable when the defendant’s speech is nasty.

So it’s time to crank up the constitutional engine and explain why the verdict against Gawker not only should be struck down on appeal, but why the issue shouldn’t have gone to a jury in the first place.

The bottom line is simple: Hogan is a public figure who discusses his sexual prowess on Howard Stern's radio show and more or less pre-promoted the sex tape by talking about it on the gossip site TMZ. Gawker’s constitutional right to publish content the public wants to consume outweighs what little privacy interests a public figure like Hogan may derive from state law. Even a film clip counts as content under the First Amendment.

The legal analysis, however, is a bit more complicated – and interesting.

The Florida law under which Hogan sued, like laws in many other states, says that someone who publicizes embarrassing private facts about another person is liable for damages. In addition to compensation, a jury can award punitive damages of up to three times more, which would get the verdict here into the $500 million range.

There’s no Supreme Court precedent squarely addressing the constitutionality of such state laws. If the court were to consider the question today, it’s likely that it would apply a high degree of scrutiny to the laws, since they target speech based on its content. It might say that the government has a compelling interest in protecting privacy. But then it would require a state to narrowly tailor privacy laws to serve that interest, and to show it had used the least restrictive means possible. But at a time of near-absolutism on free speech, the court might well go even farther and strike down such laws en masse.

In the meantime, lower courts apply principles derived from the justices’ opinions in related areas. One is that debate on public issues should be uninhibited. A second, closely linked, is that public figures sacrifice a good deal of their privacy when they when they enter the public sphere. Both can be traced back to New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 landmark case in which the court said public officials could only collect damages for libel if the statements against them were made with knowing or reckless disregard for their falsehood.

Taken together, these principles clearly indicate that newsworthy speech about a public figure merits full First Amendment protection. And, unfortunate though it may be, Hulk Hogan is a public figure and his sex life is newsworthy.

This is so not just because the public is hungry for celebrity sex tapes, but because Hogan himself has made his sex life a matter of public interest. In other words, this is isn’t a close case of the kind that might arise if, say, there were a sex tape of a public figure known solely as a classical pianist, where the public hadn’t been invited to speculate about the celebrity’s sex life.

Hogan offered the highly original argument to the jury that his public persona and his private one could be divorced, so that his public statements were irrelevant. But although this argument may possibly say something about the inner life of celebrities, it isn’t one the First Amendment would allow. Public figures can’t escape their special constitutional status by saying that deep down, they’re really shy.

The jury in this case may have been offering a nostalgic call for return to an era when the sex tape wasn’t a recognized method of career-making or career rehabilitation. Or it may simply have liked Hogan and hated Gawker.

But either way, the jury should never have had the chance to reach a verdict. The judge should’ve understood that, based on the facts brought out at trial and interpreted in the manner most favorable to Hogan, the First Amendment barred Hogan from recovering. She should’ve granted judgment to Gawker before the case went to the jury.

The fact that she didn’t has serious consequences. For Gawker, it means posting a huge bond or appealing the need for the bond. Doubt in the company’s future will fade as the law becomes clear, but it’s never good for a media outlet to seem vulnerable to being closed.

The costs to the First Amendment are greater, and unlike the verdict, are irreversible. Across the country, media will think twice when they consider publishing sensitive stories about public figures who may sue them. The outsized verdict is an especially effective means of chilling speech – as no doubt the jury intended.

If you don’t like sex tapes or Gawker, your reaction may be: “Good. Media should think twice about coarsening public discourse.”

But the truth is that sex has been part of our public affairs at least since the election of 1804, when opponents charged (accurately, it turns out) that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. We get the public discourse we deserve – and the function of the First Amendment is to keep it robust, even if that means defending unpleasant speakers and the vile things they say.
(Corrects gender in references to the judge in the Hogan case in the 14th and 15th paragraphs.)

Noah Feldman, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University and the author of six books, most recently "Cool War: The Future of Global Competition."

Source: http://www.bloombergview.com/article...-gawker-s-side

I told you so.

[Wells]

Hmm yeah his promoting the subject of the tape prior to the leak is a good point.

[Deleted]

Yeah, that's not a slip of the tongue. That's only an accident in the same way it was an "accident" whenever I got into trouble as a child, which is to say I did it deliberately and the only thing I regretted was getting caught.

Were you thrown out of school, discredited from all your achievements and turned into public enemy nr.1? I dont think so.
Same goes for Hogan. The damage is negligible. You're going to have a hard time proving to me that immaterial hurt feelings are equal in worth of houses in capital cities.

[Wells]

Were you thrown out of school, discredited from all your achievements and turned into public enemy nr.1? I dont think so.
Same goes for Hogan. The damage is negligible. You're going to have a hard time proving to me that immaterial hurt feelings are equal in worth of houses in capital cities.

Are you really claiming that Gawker can't publish things he said because those words might damage his profit prospects?

[Deleted]

Are you really claiming that Gawker can't publish things he said because those words might damage his profit prospects?

Are you really claiming that Gawker should publish things that are really none of our buisness, have no effect on our lives and do nothing but provoke pointless disputes?

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I can't help you. After you're done grossly exaggerating the damage done to Hogan, go call up Vince McMahon and cry to him about how it's totally not OK that he decided he didn't want Hulk Hogan working for him anymore.

Funny. You could say the same about grossly exaggerated damage to journalism. Except journalism would be better off without the likes of Gawker.

[Deleted]

That has nothing to do with anything I've said.

It has with the topic though.

[Deleted]

Rephrase: It was a very bad response that showed a lack of proficiency in the way you attempted to turn it around.

How about you address my argument and not how I put it instead?