Gawker Media founder and CEO Nick Denton published a blog post Tuesday explaining why the company’s legal battle with Hulk Hogan is far from over. But right now, enemies of the gossip site are gloating over a jury’s $140 million decision in Hogan’s favor. And one of the ways they’re doing it is by uploading trial footage of Denton to Pornhub under the heading “Man Reads Sexy Hulk Hogan Fanfic While Getting Spanked.” [NSFW, obviously.]
Ouch.
PornHub
A little context, in case you missed it: When Denton took the stand midway through the trial, Hogan’s attorneys asked him to read from A.J. Daulerio’s 2012 blog post describing the sex tape in question. So here we have Denton, a graduate of University College, Oxford, reading this passage in an even, composed, quite British manner:
He stands on the side of the bed and the woman scoots up from the pillows and resumes giving the former WWE heavyweight champion of the universe a blowjob. It is a slow, dutiful blowjob and Hulk is thrusting himself into her mouth to speed up the process.
The point was apparently to discredit Denton’s characterization of Daulerio’s post as “sympathetic” to Hogan, but the effort may have backfired due to Denton’s calm performance.
Here’s Maria Bustillos, who covered the trial for Death and Taxes:
[Denton] was trained at the institution that produced, during the time he attended, the most mellifluous, delicate, beautiful English accent the world has yet produced. So the Nick Denton Blowjob Storytime Hour, brought to you by Hogan attorney Kenneth Turkel, really was a little shocking, and yet one could not help feeling one was in the presence of an enduring cultural artifact coming to life.
And now that cultural artifact is a video on a streaming porn site, tagged “public, outside, hulkmania, spanking, hulk-hogan, british, fanfic, lawyer, scrub-lord, funny, gawker, kotaku, gmod-videos, getting-fucked, nick-denton.”
It’s a prank in the same vein as changing Gawker’s Wikipedia page to read “Owner: Hulk Hogan.” A very nice burn, certainly, but all this dancing on Gawker’s grave is likely premature.
Wikipedia
As Denton pointed out in his blog post Tuesday, the $140 million award is wildly atypical in a case like this, and far more money than Hulk himself had asked for. There’s also significant evidence that the trial jury wasn’t allowed to consider, including recently released documents that may show the lawsuit wasn’t about this particular sex tape at all.
Denton, having seen the documents after they were unsealed Friday, argues that “Hogan filed the claim because he was terrified that one of the other tapes, which memorialized his rant about his daughter dating ‘fucking niggers,’ might emerge.”
“A state appeals court and a federal judge have already held repeatedly that the 2012 commentary and short video excerpt, which joined an existing conversation and explored the public’s fascination with celebrity sex tapes, were newsworthy,” Denton wrote.
“We have had our day in trial court, and we lost. We will have our day back in appeals court, and we will be vindicated.”
Maybe so. But for now, he’s on Pornhub.
Full disclosure: Jay Hathaway is a former staff writer for Gawker.
Screengrab via Pornhub