HULK HOGAN SHOULD BE REMEMBERED FOR PILEDRIVING GAWKER MEDIA INTO THE GROUND:

In 2012, [Gawker editor A. J. Daulerio] posted a video to Gawker of Hogan having sex with the estranged wife of a friend. (The video was filmed secretly and was delivered to Gawker, again, only after a failed blackmail attempt on Hogan.) Hogan sent a cease-and-desist letter to Gawker, but owner Nick Denton refused to have it taken down, arguing that the comments Daulerio made underneath it mocking Hogan gave it “news value,” despite its otherwise being a fairly clear-cut case of invasion of privacy. Hogan, then near bankruptcy, lacked the ability to pursue what would have inevitably been a monumentally expensive case against the Gawker Media empire.

That is, until billionaire Peter Thiel quietly stepped into the picture. The PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley CEO had been outed as gay by Gawker several years prior to this — the only reason proffered by Gawker and its defenders at the time was that he had demonstrated right-wing proclivities — and he had never forgiven them for the invasion of his privacy. While Thiel had little hope of legal recourse in his own situation — he was, in fact, gay, so he had no grounds for a defamation suit — he recognized immediately that the humiliating invasion of privacy Hogan had suffered (and was continuing to suffer) was a very different, and much stronger, case.

So Thiel went to Hogan with a proposition: If Hogan wanted to sue, he would cover all of his legal expenses — to the tune of what turned out to be over $10 million — so long as Hogan promised never to settle the case. They were going to take this one all the way to court and to a jury verdict, win or lose, come hell or high water.

You probably know what happened next: They won. The trial was a pig circus for the ages, with Daulerio destroying Gawker forever by announcing, during a videotaped deposition, that he would publish the sex tape of anyone unless they were a child under the age of four. When the jury finally handed down its verdict in June 2016, it awarded Hogan a whopping $140 million in cumulative damages. The jury award ended Gawker Media almost instantly. (They filed for bankruptcy in June and were sold for scrap in August.)

John Sexton adds, “For the leftist media it was a major setback (though obviously not a lasting defeat). A kind of ruthless cruelty they had not-so-secretly admired and hoped to adopt more widely for use against their political enemies got blown away. Since then they’ve had to rein in some of their worst instincts for fear of a similar end. For me, that’s Hulk Hogan’s greatest legacy.”