Woman in Hogan sex tape: Didn't know I was being filmed
Case pits privacy rights vs. First Amendment
Hulk Hogan’s sex-video playmate described her adulterous tryst with the pro-wrestling great in detail for jurors at the Gawker trial Wednesday — admitting in a taped deposition that she had sex multiple times with Hogan at her husband’s request.
Raven-haired stunner Heather Cole said Hogan was just one of the many men with whom she trysted at the behest of her shock-jock spouse, who legally changed his name to Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. She said he enjoyed making video recordings of her romps.
“Did Mr. Clem generally pick who you had sex with?” asked Michael Berry, a lawyer for the Gawker media company, which Hogan is suing for $100 million for posting a clip of him having sex with Cole.
“On the occasion that I had sex with someone other than him, yes,” Cole, 41, responded.
Cole insisted that — despite making sex tapes with other men for her then-hubby’s sick kicks — she had no idea she was being taped when she had the tryst with Hogan that was revealed on the Gawker Web site.
Sniffling throughout the deposition, which was played at the trial, Cole said she had no qualms when the Love Sponge asked her to hook up with his best pal, Hogan, who at the time was splitting from his first wife, Linda.
“I said I would,” she testified, saying that she had never been interested in having sex with him before then.
Cole recalled having sex with Hogan — whose real name is Terry Bollea — on four separate occasions at the request of her then-husband. She said they had sex in her bedroom, at his home, in Clem’s studio, and once at a Tennessee hotel.
“What do you recall about the sexual encounter in Tennessee?” asked Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder.
“I performed a sexual act,” she said.
“Do you recall what it was?” Harder pressed Cole, who responded: “I was asked to go to Mr. Bollea’s room by my husband, and I did.”
The third time they had sex was at Clem and Cole’s home — and she claims she thought they were totally alone during the encounter.
It wasn’t until several weeks later that Clem showed her the explicit footage he had surreptitiously recorded in 2007, she said.
“At some point after the encounter at our house with Mr. Bollea, Mr. Clem showed me a videotape of myself with Mr. Bollea having sex,” she said, biting her lip and sniffling. “I did not watch it. It was brief.”
“What was the response to Mr. Clem when he showed you that?” Harder asked.
“I was upset,” she said.
“Did you have any idea before the sexual encounter happened that it was going to be filmed?” Harder asked.
“No,” she said without hesitating.
But Cole confessed to being well aware that her husband had installed a security camera in their bedroom — and it wasn’t visible, she said.
“Bubba had told me that his attorney said it might be a good idea to have a camera in case something ever happened,” she said, adding later he was concerned about valuables that he kept in the closet.
Hogan is suing Gawker, its founder Nick Denton, and the ex-editor who posted the video, A.J. Daulerio, saying that the company violated his right to privacy by publishing the 1-minute, 41-second clip on Oct. 4, 2012.
But Gawker argues it was exercising its First Amendment right, claiming that because Hogan is a public figure, his sex life is a matter of public interest.
When media outlets like TMZ and The Dirty started reporting on the existence of a Hogan sex tape in the spring of 2012, Cole said she grew “concerned.”
She said that the Love Sponge sent her an e-mail telling her to contact authorities if she knew anything about who might have been leaking info about the sex tape to the media.
“I did respond. I said I would be happy to cooperate, please let me know who I need to speak with,” she said in the video deposition.
Cole denied having anything to do with the video’s release — and said she never watched the snippet that was eventually published on Gawker.
“Were you concerned at the time of [Clem’s] e-mails that he would try to profit off the tape?” Berry asked.
“I was concerned my personal life would probably be exposed,” she responded.
Cole said that when Gawker posted the clip, she just wanted the whole thing to go away — and she felt “more embarrassed” when Hogan started talking to the press.
“I thought that I didn’t have anything to say about it, and I was very hurt,
and I felt or I wished that the other people involved would behave the same way,” she said.
“In your experience, is Mr. Bollea someone who likes publicity?” Berry asked.
“In my opinion, yes,” Cole responded.
Cole also insisted that Hogan was dead wrong when he went on Howard Stern’s show just days after the video was released on Gawker, and said she was “relentless” in her pursuit of him.
“I didn’t do that,” she said flatly.
But Cole did recall the more mundane conversations they had shared when Hogan was staying at their home for a few weeks while he was going through the divorce.
“One day I was making lunch, and I asked Mr. Bollea if he’d like some, and we discussed how long it had been since he had a home-cooked meal, and he was sad,” she explained, her voice breaking.
Her ex-hubby courted controversy, she said, and once told her, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right.”
According to Cole, Clem could be both “funny” and “loving,” but also “manipulative, selfish, intimidating, and hurtful.”
If a jury rules in Hogan’s favor, it could be devastating for Gawker, which could be on the hook for as much as $50 million immediately under Florida law, even if the case went to appeal.
This article originally appeared in the New York Post's Page Six.
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