Hulk Hogan and his lawyers have found a way to bring Gawker into the scandal that lead to the WWE terminating his contract. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, and his team think that the racist rant leak is somehow linked to Gawker’s own troubles with its story about the Conde Nast CFO.
These two controversies first started on different tracks, but Hogan is trying to bring them together. Back on July 16, Gawker ran a story that outed the CFO of Conde Nast, who isn’t a public figure. The story was pulled by Gawker CEO Nick Denton, a move that the editorial team hated so much that the executive editor and editor-in-chief both resigned. The incident put new focus on Gawker’s reporting and their typically nasty headlines.
Meanwhile, last week, the National Enquirer and Radar Online published portions of the transcript from a sex tape that featured Hogan and leaked by Gawker. However, when Gawker first published the sex tape in 2012, it did not include Hogan’s racist complaints about his daughter Brooke dating a black man. The tabloid reports lead to the WWE terminating its contract with the wrestling legend and Hogan apologized.
Hogan is suing Gawker for $100 million for the sex tape leak, although that trial has been delayed. Now, TMZ is reporting that Hogan has filed new court papers, asking the judge in the case to investigate Denton and Gawker executive A.J. Daulerio for leaking the sex tape transcript to tabloids. He claims that if Denton and Daulerio did it, they should be thrown in jail and he should automatically get his $100 million.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hogan also suggests a link between the Conde Nast CFO fiasco and his own problems. The Conde Nast CFO story and the Hogan lawsuit could reveal how Gawker really works, destroying their business, Hogan claims, so they had to leak the transcripts.
“Having already publicly admitted that a victory for Mr. Bollea would destroy Gawker and its way of doing business, Gawker Defendants had very few options remaining to save their way of life,” the documents state.
“Hulk Hogan has only one person to blame for what he said and no one from Gawker had any role in leaking that information,” Gawker President and general counsel Heather Dietrick told TMZ and THR.
There will be a hearing in the case on Thursday in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Hogan filed his lawsuit.
image courtesy of Walter McBride/INFphoto.com