Citation Needed - Hulk Hogan, the Love Sponge, and Peter Thiel

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Bollea v. Gawker was a lawsuit filed in 2013 in the Circuit Court of the Sixth Judicial Circuit in Pinellas County, Florida, delivering a verdict on March 18, 2016. In the suit, Terry Gene Bollea, known professionally as Hulk Hogan, sued Gawker Media, publisher of the Gawker website, and several Gawker employees and Gawker-affiliated entities[2] for posting portions of a sex tape of Bollea with Heather Clem, at that time the wife of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. Bollea's claims included invasion of privacy, infringement of personality rights, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Prior to trial, Bollea's lawyers said the privacy of many Americans was at stake while Gawker's lawyers said that the case could hurt freedom of the press in the United States.[4][5]   Link to donation page along with the embedded youtube live link:   https://secure.actblue.com/donate/humanists    

Hey everybody, Cecil here, jumping in before we get started. The Citation Needed crew is going to be having a fundraiser, the Humanists for Harris, which is going to be taking place on the 21st of September, 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central. For that fundraiser, we are going to be going live for two hours on YouTube and we are going to be covering, essentially giving the Citation Needed treatment, the introduction to Project 2025. So we are going to read that and interject like we would any other script on Citation Needed. So we'd love to see you show up to hang out and be involved in that live stream, which again will be happening on September 21st at 8 PM Eastern time.

Now, if you were planning on perhaps donating a thousand dollars or more to the Harris Walls campaign already and would like to be included in our matches, we would love to hear from you and include you with the other people who have already pledged to be a matching donation for others. So if you are interested in being a matching donor, you can send us a message at citationpod at gmail.com and I will get back to you to make sure that you understand all the ins and outs of that. We'd love to have people line up beforehand for matches. So if you are interested, be sure to reach out to us

and be sure to come donate, hang out, live citation needed September 21st, 8 p.m. Eastern time. All right, here's the show. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be sifting through the sewage tonight,

but I'll need some men with stomachs strong enough to plumb the depths of the internet. First up, our Hulk and our Hogan, Tom and Cecil. You see, the problem with the depths of the internet is how often things surface I'm the Hogan, huh? I know nothing Thank you and also joining us tonight a man who had a love sponge before it was cool no illusions Based on your estimation of my age. I had I had one before the earth cooled. I guess that's true Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Before we begin tonight, I want to take a moment to thank our patrons.

Patrons, if you learn anything from tonight's show, it's that we could be doing way worse stuff for money on the Internet than this show. But thanks to you, we don't have to. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show. And without another way, Noah. Tell us what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today? And or event. Yeah. So, so Tom has today's tripartite topic listed as Hulk Hogan,

the love sponge, and Peter Teal. And, and none of that sounds good at all. No, it doesn't. Really doesn't. You appear to have had a stroke while titling your essay. What? I've seen our future and it smells like burnt toast, Eli. Yes. All right.

Well, take us on a journey, Tom. Well, today I'm going to tell us a story that Heath is very likely to find. Interesting. If you ever here's the episode, it's a story about the unlikeliest possible convergences, a story so absurd and surreal that you may need to resupply yourself with yarn and push pins. But I promise you that this whole story is true.

This will be a story involving eighties wrestling icon and conservative celebrity, Hulk Hogan, a guy who calls himself Bubba the love sponge tech billionaire and all around douche canoe, Peter Thiel project, 2025 JD Vance, and an existential threat to the first amendment. This story is insane, but it's also weirdly urgently important while still being just is tragically stupid if any story really speaks to the unbelievably and danger of the times that we're living in. This one might actually be at.

Can America get like one good metaphor before I die or is it just always going to be snow deaths and bear murders? I just like what one's, you know? Oh, cause it's hard to sell the urgency of a show that's recorded two and a half weeks in advance, but you're nailing it so far, Tom. So well done. So our story is going to start with a little trash gossip site, now defunct, but once quite popular called Gawker. If you aren't familiar with Gawker, imagine an exclusively online version of TMZ without all the high-minded morality.

Gawker's claim to fame was their willingness to publish just fucking anything and to do it with a mean girl snark and a flair that drew rubber-necking assholes in like flies to shit. So it was without much fanfare or raised eyebrows when in December of 2007 Gawker published a post titled, Peter Thiel is totally gay people. And to be clear, Peter Thiel is totally gay and this was hardly a scoop. Nonetheless, this post would be the first domino in the Rube Goldberg machine that would eventually threaten and still threatens the very existence of the fourth estate. Admittedly the headline Peter Thiel is buying the end of democracy doesn't have the same

flair Tom. Right. Right. Yeah. I know. Thus, Tom's tripartite title sees. So I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Makes sense.

Now is he Peter Thiel took offense to the post, but the post was perfectly legal if in poor taste and it was in very poor taste. Generally news outlets avoid outing people because that's fucking gross, but it's still legal. We have a rather significant amendment here in the United States that protects the press from retribution for publishing true shit, and this was true. For Teal, the post was a slap in the face and he felt under attack, but Peter Teal, with a net worth around $9 billion, is not like the rest of us because Teal had

the resources and the wherewithal to take his flaming hot rage, roll it into a ball, and fan its flames with huge piles of money. Which he does until 2011 when, while in Berlin, he takes lunch with an unnamed operative who, knowing about Teal's rage boner against Gawker, suggests a plan. By their rival, the Washington Rubber Necker! Hahahaha! If Teal will agree to be patient, and he's already been nursing a grudge for years at this point, and if he's willing to spend a shit ton of money,

the operative, known only as Mr. A, had an idea on how they could destroy Gawker and Teal could get his revenge. At Mr. A's suggestion, Teal formed a shell company whose only purpose was to fund investigations and lawyers to find any and all causes of action against Gawker, sifting through the mostly mundane and banal minor skirmishes looking for the juiciest plum. The effort would take years and would cost millions of dollars, but eventually they found their guy. A man who fears no man, no beast or evil. A real American hero who would fight for the downtrodden billionaire, Hulk Hogan. I'm sorry, Peter, but after $6 billion of research and effort,

we could not bring an actual bag for a douche to life, but we got really, really close. I will not have you tarnishing the name of the star of such action comedy classics as no Holds Barred, Suburban Commando, and then Hollywood learned their lesson. So now we're going to go back in time again, this time in 2006. The Hulkster was not living his best life at this time. His marriage is falling apart.

Hulk Hogan was big sad about it. Naturally, the Hulkster turned for comfort and solace to his best friend, a Floridian shock jock named Bubba the Love Sponge. Bubba, or perhaps Mr. Sponge, I'm not sure which he prefers, he wanted to cheer his buddy up, so he invited Hulk over to his home so that Hulk could fuck Mr. Sponge's wife and make Hulk feel better. Which is neighborly and chill. It's just a little pick me up, wife, fuck, cuck fun for the Hulkster.

And Hulk Hogan agreed, but only on the express condition that Bubba the love sponge not videotaped the encounter, which the love sponge agrees to. But I guess nobody noticed that he had his fingers crossed because Bubba the Love Sponge not videotaped the encounter, which the Love Sponge agrees to, but I guess nobody noticed he had his fingers crossed, because Bubba totally secretly recorded his buddy, Hulk Hogan, having a cheer up fuck with his wife. Which should be fine, because people had seen him filming his partners faking their reactions for decades at that point, right? Old news. Now the tape, a DVD, actually was put away for safekeeping. In Bubba the Love Sponge's desk at work. At the radio station.

Where it was promptly stolen by a rival shock jock and in 2012 the video was leaked to Gawker. 100% a publicity stunt to get someone to say, bubble a love sponge on a citation needed show. 100%. Now since publishing someone's private sex tape videos is a disgusting violation of personal privacy with no news value, Gawker refused to publish it. I'm just kidding. They edit that thing down immediately, immediately publish a one minute clip of the stolen sex tape with no attempt whatsoever to get consent from Hulk or Bubba the love sponge's wife.

And they ran it with the headline, quote, even for a minute, watching Hulk Hogan have sex in a canopy bed is not safe for work. Watch it anyway. Stay for work, watch it anyway. Little touches matter in a headline. I think there's a non-zero number of people that clicked on it just because they wanted to see the bed. Right? Right? Like, he's not fucking on some shitty ass sleigh bed is he?

Oh no, a canopy is that. Canopy? What? Sales of that bed on Wayfair skyrocketed afterwards. What's the thread count on those sheets? That's amazing. Is that a duvet? My god.

Hulk Hogan, betrayed by his best friend, Bubba the Love Sponge, and now humiliated by Gawker, tells the press that he is going to sue for this violation of his privacy and then back at Peter teal's evil volcano layer All the klaxons and sirens immediately go off secretly lawyers working for teal's revenge incorporated Contact Hulk Hogan's attorney and they offered a bankroll the whole fucking thing but on the down low. Hulk's legal team, now with billionaire hate money undergirding the effort, files a lawsuit seeking $100 million in damages. And if you're thinking, Tom, there is no way Gawker was ever worth $100 million, you

would be very, very right. Yeah, it's not the worst thing but one of the weirdest things about evil people on the internet is that they're doing it for so much less money than you think they are it's yeah yeah it's downright weird now you might be wondering here why would that rival shock jock leak the video to gawker what did he have against Hogan nothing but Hogan wasn't fucking himself in that video he was fucking Bubba's wife and what the guy wanted was to embarrass Bubba and then somehow use that to steal Mr. Sponge's coveted time slot

now why did he wait five years to do this? No idea. And if you're wondering if perhaps the secret operative, Mr. A had anything to do with perhaps creating the perfect lawsuit. Why, when that might be interesting. Okay. I know he's not here because he ripped his dick off again, but put out feelers for this, right? Who was email blasting?

If anyone has a sex crime, they feel like they could commit on Gawker.com. Please reach out to me. Also, I don't think you have to do the interesting thing when we like know it was a conspiracy. Right? Like there might be some question about

who's in on what and who bankrolled what, but we don't need to go all coast to coast AM when we're talking about the fucking gunpowder plot. Fair enough. So Hogan and Gonker had to trial. And that is actually pretty weird, because these things don't usually go to trial, they settle. That's how almost all of these things work. But Hogan's legal team, secretly bankrolled by Teal, were going very hard in the paint, and they weren't even entertaining the idea

of settlement. And the lawyers working for Gawker had no idea they weren't up against just Hulk Hogan, so they were defending the case as if the case wasn't being pursued by a billionaire nursing a years old grudge. Eli, for $10, what does hard in the paint mean? You know what? Forget it. I'm sorry. Is it period sex? I shouldn't have said anything. I'm sorry. I feel like it's period sex. Give me $10.

What is now? So to trial they go, which means that now Hulk fucking Hogan has to sit in court wearing a suit, which means that now Hulk fucking Hogan has to sit in court wearing a suit, a t-shirt, just in case he needs to rip it off and body slam the judge, I guess, and no shit, a do rag to cover his stupid balding head. And then he has to testify about how it made him

super duper sad when his sex tape got leaked, brother. Yeah, look, given the way Hulk Hogan has both looked and talked for his entire career, duper sad when his sex tape got leaked. Brother. Yeah. Look, given the way Hulk Hogan has both looked and talked for his entire career, how the fuck are you going to claim somebody else humiliated him? Right? That motherfucker came pre-humiliated. He was humiliated out of the fucking box. Come on.

All right. So then things get even weirder if possible. So remember Gawker only published one minute of the sex tape. Well, it turns out that Hulk Hogan in the throes of carnal bliss with Bubba the love sponges wife uses a lot of explicit racial slurs, like a lot. Yes. And homophobic slurs. What? Because Hulk Hogan has the most distressing dirty talk possible, I guess. And also he was having sex with a white woman. So I have no idea where that language could have come from. Yeah. Awful big talk from someone who

called watching each other's sex tapes a total non-starter when we formed Citation Needed LLC, Tom. What are you hiding? And of course, Hulk knew he was dropping N-bombs and F-slurs on the tapes, so there's some speculation that what Hulk really wanted from the lawsuit was to prevent the whole tape from coming out, so that no one would know that he was a great big racist piece of shit. But Teal didn't give a shit about Hulk Hogan or what Hulk wanted from the lawsuit, and Teal was secretly driving the whole thing because Hulk is stupid and Teal is paying

all the lawyers. So the truth about Hulk Hogan came out in court, which means it became public, and there was an uproar about this. Hulk Hogan was booted from the WWE Hall of Fame as a result of being a huge piece of shit. All right, well, while I remind Tom of the invaluable contributions to cinema made by Mr. Hogan and the dire need to preserve his legacy,

we'll take a quick break for some Apropos of Nothing. And now it's time for America's favorite game show. Celebrity Sex Tape. Celebrity Sex Tape. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Chet Chesterson and welcome to Celebrity Sex Tape, where we find out what your sex tape does for your career. Our contestant tonight is the mountain of muscle

professional wrestler, Hulk Hogan. Come on down. Pleasure to be here brother. Is it? No, yeah, never is. So tell us a little about the tape. Pretty tame fucking my buddy's wife saying slurs. The usual we call that usual. My name is Hulk Hogan.

Yeah, no, OK, that tracks. So before we spin the wheel, are you ready to hear about our prizes? Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Alright, let's see. There's here you have respectful admiration or the Chris Evans. There's career destroying or the Rob Lowe. And then there's this tiny sliver right here.

Oh, what's that? That is the Kardashian slice. It's where we make you a billionaire for some fucking reason. Why would you make someone a billionaire because of their sex tape? Why indeed. Let's give it a spin. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Oh, I'm sorry. It looks like you're going to stay exactly where you are. Embarrassing absurdity. Oh, man.

That's all for tonight's show. But until next time, remember remember if you're filming yourself fucking cheat out! And we're back. When we left off, what sounded like a mean-spirited turn of Cards Against Humanity was happening. Tell us how is that going to destroy America? Well, like none of any of the rest of that stuff matters to the facts of the case at hand, but the facts of the case at hand did persuade the jury to hand Hulk Hogan, but really Peter Thiel, a stunning victory in total.

The damages to Gawker were $100 million as a truly shocking amount of money. And not just because it's a lot of money, but because it is expressly a punishing amount of money, an amount of money that Gawker could not possibly pay. Now, importantly, this doesn't usually happen. Awards of damages generally are not so enormous that they shut down entire journalistic enterprises, and that isn't an accident. As a society, we try not to financially destroy journalistic institutions on principle.

But we did here, and Gawker was now ruined and would soon collapse under the unyielding weight of this grinding financial millstone. While Hulk Hogan would rehab his image by apologizing a few times and then giving a speech at the Republican National Convention. But our story doesn't end here. Definitely not the only person on the RNC stage to drop racial and homophobic slurs. I feel like those people had their own green room there. Yeah. Yeah. No, the green room.

So Peter Thiel had learned some lessons here. And one of them is that if you are rich enough, and he is, you can use your money to take down an entire journalistic publication and just wipe it off the face of the earth. Now look, Gawker was a tough company to be sympathetic to. I get that. This was the site that regularly published photos of celebrity breasts taken without permission that wrote defamatory bullshit that they admitted they knew wasn't true for clicks,

like the article they wrote about James Franco raping someone, an article the author admitted to making up. When a Gawker editor testified at Hogan's trial, he was asked if there was any celebrity sex tape that he wouldn't publish, and the only carve out he allowed for was for kids under the age of four. Oh cool.

Hey Bailiff, please shoot this guy in the back of the head. Let's just call him Green. Just a real quick pip pip. Nobody saw anything in advance? All right then. So yeah, Glocker's a tough sell for me here on the sympathy front, but they were an operating publication that did also occasionally publish real news and a billionaire biding his time was able to put them out of business just because he had so much money he could rub it like a magic lamp to make his wishes

come true. Peter Thiel is a man with very, very scary wishes. And one incredible sporting dream. And the Hogan Glocker thing isn't his first foray into leveraging his massive wealth to steer the ships of power. Everybody listening to this is familiar with the charmless sack of Craven opportunism that calls itself JD Vance. But what you might not know is that JD Vance or rather the rise of Vance This was all just a pet project of Peter teal though why anyone would want to pet JD Vance is beyond me

Okay, but that does explain why he has a puppy cut though JD Vans for walkies JD when he go for walkies Donut Peter deals walk up behind with a baggie picking up his shit. Oh man. JD Vance was, until fairly recently, little more than a liar who wrote a bad book. But his connection to Thiel began years ago. While at Yale Law, Vance attended a Thiel talk about technological stagnation and the decline of American elites. While at Yale Law, Vance attended a Teal talk about technological stagnation and the decline

of American elites. Teal's speech would be noted by Vance as quote, the most significant moment of Vance time at Yale. The two shared the same terrible idea that a strong America will get out of the way of the elites who should be running the place and in return, the elites will magnanimously decide to build everyone a just society. Yeah, a belief bullied by the exact zero times the rich have done anything like that in all of human history. You remember the episode on Fordlandia? That is the closest we ever got.

So enamored was JD Vance by Teal's speech, he sought out and found work after graduation at Mithril Capital, Teal's global investment firm. In 2019, Teal helped fund Vance's venture capital firm and Teal was encouraging the mostly human-shaped Vance to run for public office. In 2021, backed by Teal, Vance took aim at the Ohio Senate race and teal introduced Vance to Trump the same year. Though Vance was at this time in a Serb critic of Trump sensing that his puppet had a chance at winning teal sank an astonishing 15 million dollars of his

own money into Vance's run for office. And that helps secure the victory. And you have to imagine that teal having handpicked and paid for this candidate wanted something for the money. Now is this essay gonna take a dark cuckold turn here? Okay now you sound like Hulk Hogan. And he does want something but it's crazier and darker than what you're probably thinking. Peter Thiel isn't just a dark money donor secretly paying for and controlling Hulk Hogan

lawsuits and elevating to prominence people shaped skinwalkers. Thiel has been subsidizing more than a dozen candidates across the MAGA spectrum. Peter Thiel, not coincidentally, also owns a tech company called Palantir. And Palantir is a massive information analysis company. And if everything goes Thiel's way, there's going to be a lot of new information to analyze and billions more money to make. And, and his fucking company is named after the crystal balls that Sauron used to

coordinate his attacks. People, they're not even trying to disguise it. JD Vance supports and has voted in favor of menstrual surveillance laws. And if the government suddenly has to surveil tens of millions of women's If the government suddenly has to surveil tens of millions of women's menstrual cycles, someone, or rather some company, will have to collect and analyze all of that information. And that sure as hell sounds an awful lot like a job for Palantir. Peter Thiel is backing JD Vance. He created JD Vance, along with other MAGA nut jobs,

in the hopes that they will pass the terrifying draconian laws that Teal's companies need in order to build information surveillance products to cash in on the whole nightmarish mess. Okay, next you're going to tell me for-profit prison lobbyists lobby for stricter sentencing guidelines. Come on, man. So where we are right now is a place where a billionaire tech bro, who believes that freedom and democracy are incompatible, his words,

is able to use his money to front a washed up 80s wrestling star and shut down journalistic publications that displease him, buy the candidacy of the roughly person shaped clump of meat calling itself JD Vance and bankroll politicians to create laws curtailing women's freedoms all so that Peter can make billions more dollars spying on our menstrual cycles. Right, but if you'd like to spend way less, Peter give us a call. We'll make Tom's voice clone do a whole apology episode for you buddy. We'll make Tom's voice clone do a whole apology episode for you, buddy. If you don't like this. We'll even, you will let you make Heath a senator, right? He looks racist.

Oh, sure. He does. Very racist. Hulk Hogan collected very, very little actual money from this verdict, and he also lost his best friend, Bubba the Love Sponge. Gawker briefly returned and then promptly failed again, this time without the help of evil tech bro billionaire interference, and as of this recording it remains to be seen whether our next vice president will be owned outright by a guy who put 150 journalists out of

work because one of them called him gay. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence Tom, what would that be? If you have nine billion dollars and your annual return on your assets is a modest six percent, you can bankrupt 25 publications and buy 25 senators a year without ever touching the principal. Okay, good financial planning. Alright, and are you ready for the quiz? Why not? So we found out about that guy talking about four-year-olds earlier for Gawker Gawker realized that they were neglecting a Valuable market in that and instead of ignoring kids under four decided to develop a TV a TV show just for them What was it called Tom? Oh, no, no, no, no

tug rats See Oh or D, Love SpongeBob SquarePants. Love SpongeBob SquarePants! Fantastic. That's good. The others make me deeply uncomfortable. I didn't write those. That was Gawker, guys.

Gawker did that. They're bad. Evil. Hey, Cecil, I just want you to know you're standing the first step on a road that ends at Senior Pets, just so you know. Down the end of that road. I'm walking forward. It's D.

Okay, sure. That's the only one that's not really offensive. Sure. I think that's a good one. All right, Tom. Obviously, Peter Thiel has had some bad ideas, but he has also had one incredibly, amazingly good idea. What is it?

A, being somehow impossibly not the least likeable billionaire. B, spelling his last name weird so he's hard to Google and make fun of or see the steroid Olympics, which I would want that. Oh my God. Is that real? Did he suggest the steroid Olympics? He wants to do a steroid Olympics where we just juice them up, where we see how fast this baby can go and I fucking love it. I am in. I am in. I am in.

I think we should be able to have biomechanical parts built in. Of course. Let's do it. Yes. Look, what's the argument? Oh, otherwise we would ruin their lives. They're 15. They're 15.

They don't know how to spell the flips they do. Let's get in there. Jesus Christ. People, do you hear the people? Steroid Olympics for the win. All right. I have a different one. Jesus, I might as the only one that doesn't need to be edited out this week.

I have a question for you, Tom. We'll be fine suing websites like Gawker out of business because we still have independent journalism in the form of a independent newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, which are taking rightward turns under billionaire ownership. B, local newspapers and news stations, which are taking the right word turn under conglomerate ownership. Um, C patron funded internet journalism, which is taking a right word term because of Magus profitability or D. Oh my God guys, we're all that's left.

And we devoted a whole episode to fuck robots. Oh my god guys, we're all that's left and we devoted a whole episode to fuck robots once. I'm gonna cry myself to sleep because the answer is D. I think the answer's D, man. Alright, Tom, you didn't fool anybody this week, which means the Steroid Olympics win! Steroid Olympics! Me, I choose me for the next essay. No, I choose you. I'm the winner. I choose you. I choose me for the next that's not I choose you I'm the winner I choose you that's I choose me no

All right, well for Noah Tom Heath and Cecil, I'm Eli Bosnic. Thank you for hanging out with us today We'll be act next week and by then I will be an expert on something else between now and then you can chickadee check out Our podcast before you rickety wreck yourselves in all the podcast places. No. And if you'd like to help keep the- we've had a lot of episodes guys, it's 388. I know I haven't out-churned all of them, but I've out-churned enough. Chickadee check and rickety wreck is what I had. And if you'd like to help keep the show going, you can make it per episode donation at patreon.com

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