Hulk Hogan (ne Terry Bollea) died Thursday at age 71.
I was a wrestling fan in Hogan’s early days in then-WWF the late-’70s/early-’80s as a heel battling Andre the Giant and having a role in Rocky III. I had stopped watching by the time he became a hero and champion and helped turn now-WWE into an international juggernaut
But Hogan also played a role as free-speech villain. The website Gawker published a tape of Hogan having sex with the wife of a friend/Florida DJ. Hogan; the video also captured Hogan saying a bunch of racist stuff (not the only time, it turns out). Hogan won a $ 140 million invasion-of-privacy judgment in 2016. Although they settled post-verdict for $ 31 million, that was too much and Gawker declared bankruptcy a few months later. Post-verdict, we learned that Peter Thiel anonymously (including to Hogan and his attorney) financed the litigation to get revenge against Gawker for writing bad stuff about him (it may have outed him). I use this in Civ Pro to illustrate the problematic assumptions underlying complete diversity (Hogan kept the case out of Florida federal court by including the Floridian woman in the video as defendant). There was a 2017 documentary and a 2018 book about the case. WWE cut ties with Hogan, including removing him from its Hall of Fame, when the video dropped; it reinstated him in 2018, although he never regained his popularity.
The whole thing is wild in chaos-theory terms. Hogan went MAGA late in life. The growth of the WWE thanks to Hogan gave Linda McMahon crowing about making Columbia university safe for conservatives. And the demonstration of Peter Thiel’s power gave us Vice President J.D. Vance.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on July 24, 2025 at 03:15 PM