ST. PETERSBURG — Nearly three weeks after they first learned that the 62-year-old former wrestler Hulk Hogan had appeared in a sex tape, six jurors began deliberating Friday in a case that tests the bounds of the First Amendment.
In closing arguments, attorneys for Hogan, whose legal name is Terry Bollea, said the former wrestler had suffered terribly when excerpts of the sex tape were posted online in 2012 by the gossip website Gawker. His lawsuit against Gawker, its founder Nick Denton, and the web post's author A.J. Daulerio, has been on trial in downtown St. Petersburg since early March.
Bollea maintains he was secretly recorded and his privacy was violated. He is shown in the video having sex with the wife of a friend, Tampa DJ Bubba the Love Sponge Clem.
On Friday, his attorneys asked the jury to award him roughly $50 million in compensatory damages, a figure they arrived at by calculating how much Bollea might have earned if he had chosen to market the sex tape himself, a possibility he testified had never crossed his mind. If the jury decides to pursue punitive damages, his attorneys will have another opportunity to ask for more money.
In his final appeal to the jury, Bollea attorney Kenneth Turkel described Gawker as a website run by morally debased, traffic-hungry writers who don't believe the right to privacy exists for anyone. Pointing to an interview in which Denton said, "privacy invasion has a positive effect on society," Turkel scoffed.
