Hulk Hogan testifies in lawsuit against Gawker over sex tape
Lawyers argue website violated the former professional wrestling superstar's right to privacy
Hulk Hogan returned to a Pinellas Country, Fla., courtroom on Tuesday and was cross-examined by lawyers for the media website, Gawker. During his time on the stand, the wrestler was asked explicit questions about his sex life and sexual parts.
The trial aims to determine if Gawker had the right to post a one minute and forty one second clip of a sex tape Hogan insists he didn’t know was being filmed. Approximately nine seconds of the clip Gawker shared online included actual sexual content.
Hogan took the stand for the second day in a row and the initial questioning by Gawker’s legal team spent several hours focused on the celebrity’s response in the media when reports of the sex tape first surfaced, particularly when he called into TMZ Live and discussed the tape with TMZ hosts.
He admitted that when told TMZ he didn’t know who the brown-haired woman in his sex tape was he "embellished a little bit about the number of women" he had slept with.
While on the stand, the 62-year-old had to answer questions about the way he has discussed his sex life in public in the past. Passages from a book he wrote, in which he describes an affair he had, were read, and clips were played from an explicit radio interview he gave to his former friend Bubba the Love Sponge.
After Gawker posted a clip of the tape, Hogan said there were many people who assumed he was involved in its creation.
“It wasn’t about Hulk Hogan making a sex tape," he said. "That’s not what happened. It’s never been about that…”
He insisted he in no way made the tape to make money.
“We had calls from Vivid Entertainment… and they said ‘there’s an open checkbook, we’ll pay you anything you want,’" he recalled, but he said he had no interest in profiting off the tape.
He said of the clip Gawker shared on their website, “It lives forever. It will be there forever on the Internet.”
Hogan testified he hasn’t been the same since the tape was shared.
“I just haven’t felt like myself… this is still tearing me up,” he said. “I haven’t been able to get back up to who I was before [the tape]… I’m not the same person I was since all this craziness happened.”
He said the clip of the sex tape hit the web just as he was rebuilding his love life after his first-marriage crumbled.
“I thought I had my life together again. I was moving forward, and then this tape totally sabotaged me again,” he said. “It flipped my world completely upside down. I had a really hard time functioning."
The wrestler insisted his attitude about the sex tape in media interviews was a result of him being in character, as Hulk Hogan. Hogan’s real name is Terry Bollea.
A focus of the trial so far has been the differences between the character Hulk Hogan, which he developed for the ring, and who he is in private.
“I was totally Hulk Hogan [for the TMZ interview] because I wasn’t at home in my private house,” he said.
A lawyer also grilled Hulk about why he answered Howard Stern’s sex-tape related questions during an interview following the reports of the tape.
Hogan said his replies to Stern’s questions with “character-driven,” once again reiterating the differences between his wrestling character and his traits as a private person.
A lawyer for Hogan told FOX411, "After today's cross examination it is clear even though [Hogan] is a celebrity playing certain roles, he is deserving of privacy in his personal life. It would seem Gawker is suggesting if a celebrity plays a sexual role in a movie it would then be appropriate to post a sexual video of that celebrity taken in their private life. Being a celebrity in no way shape or form occasions the loss of right to personal privacy."
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