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It Takes A Lot to Laugh (It Takes A Train to Cry): The Tragedy of Hulk Hogan

by Charles Carreon
March 12, 2016

The Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker Media trial is a spectacle that takes shape in the eye of the beholder. Lies and distortion spin out of the courthouse like gravity waves emanating from a Hollywood black hole. Any apparent truth extracted from the event will decay into falsehood within instants of its discovery, displaying a half life shorter than a Beryllium isotope. However, I have been always fond of rarities, and perhaps by inspecting the wreckage surrounding the collision between Hulk Hogan, the unstoppable human force, and Gawker Media, the immovable corporate object, we can find some subatomic remnants worthy of attention.

Hogan's giant fall is the story. Hogan enjoyed worldwide adulation, on a par with Bruce Jenner and Lance Armstrong, whose bones were recently picked clean by the slander cartel. Falls of this magnitude drag down legions of fans, disappointing the entire tribe of sport, casting nations into despondency. And pain is a matter of degree. When there's farther to fall, the fall hurts more. As Edward II in Christopher Marlowe's play cries, in a howl of agony, "The sorrows of kings are not like the sorrows of other men!"

But sympathy for those who fall from the empyrean realms is rare. Scandal vampires, mumbling pious sympathy while chewing the cud of revenge, devour pictures of bloated starlets on the beach and burned out leading men breathing through tubes. When stars fall, they become psychic food for jealous mobs. No longer stars, their misery does not tarnish the illusion that wealth immunizes against pain.

The belief that rich people defeat misery and possess pleasure fires the popular imagination, motivates social climbers, and mutes political complaints. Actually a myth for which evidence is lacking, the belief that wealth preempts suffering is reinforced by the media at every turn. "Oh!" we are urged to dream -- "What it must be like to live like the Few!" F. Scott Fitzgerald was equating wealth with happiness and perhaps even moral superiority when he told Hemingway that "the rich are not like other people." Hemingway's retort, "Yes, they have more money," ensured a reverent place for his memory in the hearts of broke people everywhere.

Nonetheless, the empyrean heights are dangerous, and falls calamitous. Murdered by torture in the Tower of London, the agonies of Edward the Second were indeed excessive. Compared to such a devastating leveling, Hogan's sufferings may seem small; however, we should not blind ourselves to his pain and its cause. Wealth made him a target and created his problem. His name is a publicity magnet that others, like Gawker, were eager to exploit. The sex video, being a true voyeuristic theft of a famous man's privacy, was enormously valuable in the right hands. The sex happened, and the video existed, only because a man Hogan thought was his friend set it up to happen and made the film. Like an elephant in the bush, Hogan was bagged for his tusks.

Hogan's testimony about how shame and humiliation now emanate from his own mind, destroying his ability to relate with others with confidence and self-respect, is direct, first-person evidence of how a public shaming gives the victim a heart transplant. In exchange for the familiar, self-confident, self-respecting heart that usually beats in your chest, you get a filthy, defiled, garbage-pumping organ that circulates humiliation through every cell in your body, and makes you fear every human interaction as another challenge to your right to exist.

As I thought over the transcript of Hulk Hogan's trial testimony, and that of his furious estranged wife, who put her unhealed pain on record, I felt the poignancy of seeing a big man beat down to nothing. When I started writing this piece, casting about for some way to express that pain, I thought of the title of that Dylan song, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry." Although the news reports don't mention the world's most famous wrestler crying in the courtroom, I am sure it took a trainload of strength for him to give that testimony [1] , to reveal the foolish behavior that launched him on the road to total personal destruction.

Martin Luther King and the Invention of "New York Times Malice"

While the miseries of the powerful might lead us to sympathize with them when their names are dragged through the muck, the law proceeds from entirely different suppositions. The famous are deemed to have the means to "talk back" in the media, so they are "public figures," and the media doesn't have to be as careful to tell the truth about them.

This wasn't the case until March 9, 1964, when the United States Supreme Court published New York Times v. Sullivan, and punched a hole in defamation law big enough to launch a communication satellite mounted on a Saturn V rocket straight through. Before NYT v. Sullivan, suing people for talking dirt about you required only some basic allegations: your neighbor had "published" a "false statement" to third persons who understood the statement to be "of and concerning" you, and as a result, people no longer want to associate with you. And it wasn't any safer to tell lies about a "public figure" than it was to tell lies about regular people. Strangely enough, it was a certain Martin Luther King, Jr., who had begun stirring the pot of American history, whose activities prompted this momentous change in the law of defamation. Ironically, he likely did more to liberate the news media from caution and restraint than he did to improve the condition of African-Americans. Not by preference, of course, but rather because even greatness does not empower us to defy fate, that uses us for its own purposes.

Yes, the Sullivan case had an unusual origin [2], intimately connected with the activities of Dr. King. The plaintiff who gave his name to the case was the police chief of Montgomery, Alabama, who alleged that the nation's newspaper of record had defamed him by publishing an advertisement seeking to raise funds for Dr. King's legal defense, signed by luminaries such as Marlon Brando, Shelley Winters, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dr. Ralph Bunche. Among other factual inaccuracies, the advertisement overstated the number of times King had been arrested. Although not named in the advertisement, Sullivan said that criticism of the Montgomery police was "of and concerning" him. Published by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, the advertisement included a clip-out coupon to send with a contribution or to request more information.

It has often been said that hard cases make bad law, which is to say that, when the social issues are stacked up ten stories high on either side, it's going to be hard for the judge to make a ruling that will apply well as precedent in future cases. The Montgomery Police Chief's legal attack on the nation's pre-eminent liberal periodical caused the Supreme Court to circle the wagons. The Sullivan case produced this rule: A "public figure" cannot win a defamation lawsuit against a "media defendant" unless he proves that the defendant published a lie, and did so with "reckless disregard for the truth." My torts teacher Steve Schiffrin liked to call this "New York Times malice," a term that I see hasn't caught on, although I find it an excellent mnemonic to remember just how far a newspaper can go when treading on the faces of the famous.

Subsequent cases made it clear that there are two types of public figures: those who, like Hulk Hogan, have names that are as well-known as popular brands, and those who, because of their desire to speak in the public forum, "inject themselves into events," and therefore themselves become "newsworthy topics." Of course, there was a time when Hulk Hogan was just Terry Bollea, a person he would now gladly remain forever, happily eschewing any possible reversion to Hulk-hood. But Terry was at one time eager to become Hulk Hogan, and vigorously injected himself into public life. He was so feckless about super-sizing his image that he went on the Howard Stern show, which always seems like a good idea at the time, but turns out to be nothing but an opportunity to take a shit shower provided by a man with a skanky mind whose special ability is to induce people who should know better to engage in offbeat behavior for which they will later apologize, or wish they could.

So just to review, based upon a decision that got rid of a frivolous lawsuit that was intended to silence African-American speech on the issue of white racism, we got a rule that says the newspapers can be less careful about being correct when they say negative things that might be lies about famous people, because they're famous and have means of shooting back at their defamers. Then that rule expanded to allow newspapers to be less careful about saying nasty things about anyone who speaks out on an issue of public importance. This second rule turns into a third rule that anyone whose statement on a public issue gets printed in the paper is presumed to have "injected themselves into the public debate," thereby becoming a "limited public figure," about whom the newspaper can safely make false statements, so long as they don't do so with "reckless disregard for the truth." The third rule, as you can see, essentially turns anyone who speaks out and gets publicity for it into that type of person who has a "bummer of a birthmark." [4]

What Is this "Privacy" of Which You Speak?

Some people live in the world as they wish it were. Want to find some of those people? Google the phrase "no constitutional right to privacy." You will find lots of articles proclaiming this to be the truth, but it is just plain wrong. Ten States' Constitutions protect the Right to Privacy, and Florida, where the Hogan trial is taking place, is one of them. [3] Article I, Section 23 of the Florida Constitution states in relevant part: "Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person's private life except as otherwise provided herein." Take note that the first part of the sentence protects the "right to be let alone," and while the second part of the sentence seems to limit the effect of Sec. 23 to protection from "governmental intrusion," this is in fact the place where it is most needed in the forty states that lack such a constitutional protection. [5]

This phrase "the right to be let alone" has a history. It was coined by Thomas M. Cooley in his law treatise, "Law of Torts," first published in 1880. [6] The phrase was adopted by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in a Harvard Law Review article published in 1890, because Warren had been suffering from attacks in the press. This article popularized the idea, which motivated judges to recognize a right to privacy under certain circumstances, and moved legislatures to enact statutes that gave the victims of privacy invasion the right to sue for damages.

There are four types of privacy invasion lawsuits, all of which can be pursued in Florida, as well as California and many other states: (1) appropriation of name or likeness (stealing publicity), (2) intrusion into private spaces (peeping and spying),(3) public disclosure of private facts (spreading embarrassing truths), and (4) publicizing true facts that cast the victim in a false light (very similar to the previous type of claim, but the misleading facts need not have been private).

Stealing Publicity to Sell Advertising

In his case against Gawker, Hogan has invoked Florida's "right of publicity" statute, Section 540.08, just as he did back in May 2010, when he sued the cereal company, Post Foods [7], for screening an ad with a cartoon character named "Hulk Boulder" who pushed chocolate frosted sugar bombs while infringing on Hogan's famous moniker and visage. Nineteen other states [8] have right of publicity statutes, that make it unlawful for anyone to "publish, print, display or otherwise publicly use for purposes of trade or for any commercial or advertising purpose the name, portrait, photograph, or other likeness of any natural person without the express written or oral consent [of the] person." In the lawsuit over the cartoon-Hulk, Post wised up after a few months, and pulled the commercial.

In that battle, Hogan was essentially saying, "If you want me to sell your stupid cereal, call my agent, don't call a cartoonist! I'm already a cartoon!" But Gawker wasn't selling cereal, were they? No, they were selling Gawker, so Gawker made a few improvements to the video, that was long and tedious, for the most part, editing it to less than a tenth of its original length, turning it into a real porn flick by cutting out everything but the oral sex and penetration scenes, and providing a crude account of the full-length production authored by a fellow named A.J. Daulerio, a one-hit bungler if ever there was one. Oh yes, he's no longer with Gawker.

To connect up the pillaging of Hogan's privacy with the misappropriation of Hogan's mega-publicity, his lawyers alleged that: "The Gawker Defendants posted the Video and Narrative [to profit from] the sale of advertisements" and [by] "attracting new viewers to the Gawker Site," whereupon "numerous media outlets and websites picked up on the Video and Narrative posted at the Gawker Site, and posted links to it, thus exposing hundreds of millions of people to the Video and Narrative [and] massive numbers of individuals were drawn to the Gawker Site, for which the Gawker Defendants have reaped tremendous revenues and profits ... for a prolonged period of time ... as a direct result of the tremendous fame and goodwill of Plaintiff."

You know it's hard to argue with that statement. When traffic goes up on Gawker, it doesn't do so because they published a picture of A.J. Daulerio wanking off wearing Kiss makeup and high heels. That  wouldn't really be much of a draw, even if Nick Denton was doing performance art in the background, dressed in a black rubber suit. Nope, it was a case of Hulkmania, and probably sparked a lot of fan-sex. If every couple that made a baby while watching that short had named their kid "Hulk," there'd likely be preschools full of them right now.

Peeping and Spying, aka Intrusion Upon Seclusion

Now life has gotten pretty sketchy, but you can take it to the bank: it is illegal to film someone having sex in private without their permission. It doesn't matter what kind of sexual behavior they are engaged in, whether they are alone or with company, or whether one of the participants to the sex knows it's being filmed. It is illegal if it is your friend, your enemy, your neighbor, your teacher, your parents, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your wife, or anyone. It is illegal to trick your way into a place where you've been told you aren't allowed to film, and then film there. (Caveat) [9]

"Intrusion upon seclusion" is the legal name for peeping and spying. The right to enjoy seclusion is simply "the right to be left alone." A recent law review article [10] explained what constitutes an "intrusion" into one's protected seclusion:

"Examples of intrusion include the illegal diversion or interception and opening of one's mail, peeping into one's home, the viewing of a department store's changing room by someone of the opposite sex where no adequate notice has been provided, persistent and unwanted telephone calls, wiretapping, or prying into a plaintiff's bank account. To be actionable, the intrusion must be offensive or objectionable to a reasonable person, and the thing intruded upon must be private."

Think about what this means, and you'll realize that this rule sets up a flexible standard that can easily bite nosey people with cameras right in the face. "Seclusion" is being enjoyed by anyone who thinks they are alone, whether they're sitting on the toilet, putting on makeup in the bathroom mirror, or changing their clothes in a dressing room. Once the privacy is set up, the person enjoying the privacy is protected from "intrusion." Anytime someone breaks through that seclusion without permission, or without giving sufficient notice to avoid an embarrassing revelation, they risk liability.

Is this right to enjoy seclusion unlimited? No, because it only protects things that have been kept private in the first place. As a key legal treatise on the subject states: "The rule stated in this Section applies only to publicity given to matters concerning the private, as distinguished from the public, life of the individual. There is no liability when the defendant merely gives further publicity to information about the plaintiff which is already public. * * Likewise there is no liability for giving further publicity to what the plaintiff himself leaves open to the public eye." Thus, Gawker is arguing that Hogan has made the size of his penis and other sexual topics a matter of public discussion, and cannot be heard to complain that Gawker has revealed the identity of a secret sexual partner, the shape of his body, the sound of his voice as he engages in sexual activity.

Additionally, as Gawker keeps reminding us, the individual's right to keep things private is counterbalanced against the public's right to have knowledge of "newsworthy matters." Since this defense also applies to our last two privacy torts of "public disclosure of private facts," and "publicizing true facts that cast the victim in a false light," I will discuss these two torts first, then turn to the "newsworthiness" defense.

The Good, the Bad and the Seriously Misunderstood

Truth hurts. Often more than a lie, because you can't deny it. This is the problem that Hulk Hogan has. That really is him in the video, engaging in tawdry sex with a person he has no business being in bed with. Still, this is America, and just because you did something stupid doesn't mean that everyone automatically has the right to spread it all over. There are such things as "private facts" that it is tortious to "publicly disclose."

Now, in truth, this is a tort that business has got to love, because it's all about relationships and expectations. If a fellow gets drunk and goes down to the bar and foolishly spills the beans about the affair he's been having with his secretary, he cannot sue the bartender for telling the secretary's husband. Nothing was kept private, the cat got outta the bag, and them's the breaks.

But take another situation. The bartender overhears a quiet, murmured conversation between two doctors from the hospital around the corner, sharing health information about a person in the neighborhood who has HIV. The bartender tells all of his customers what he overheard. A private fact, that would normally be kept hidden from the public and is highly offensive to a reasonable person, has been disclosed to the public. Okay, now that's a tort, and neither truth nor lack of malice is a defense. Damages for plaintiff.

What about the last privacy tort on our list, "publicizing true facts that cast the victim in a false light"? To help you understand this one, I'll quote my Dad: "Son, don't do good things that look bad, or bad things that look good." I took issue with his exhortation, arguing that we shouldn't refrain from doing good things because others might criticize. Dad countered that there were plenty of good things to do that no one would say looked bad, so when I was done with all of those, I could indulge in good works that might endanger my reputation.

So let's imagine I finally did all the goodie-two-shoes stuff, and wanted to do something good that looked bad. I would go to strip bars and give out Christmas presents for the dancers who had kids, and give the bouncers back rubs. Of course, some paparazzi would photograph me coming out the back door of a dive and caption it with something misleading like, "PunkLawyer eighty-sixed for pawing dancers!" Then I would sue them for false light privacy invasion and call the bouncers as witnesses that they were the only people I laid hands on.

Gawker and the Advent of Newsworthy Porn

According to Hogan's lawyers, Gawker's edit of the Video was watched 7 Million times. Obviously people wanted to watch it. The defense of "newsworthiness" has been tendered by Gawker. Does it have any validity? According to the U.S. Supreme Court [11], when the defense of newsworthiness is offered to excuse a breach of privacy, "the first inquiry is whether the newspaper 'lawfully obtained truthful information about a matter of public significance.'"

So, let's get to it: (1) Did Gawker get the sex tape lawfully? (2) Are the sex tape and the narrative truthful? (3) Are the sex tape and written narrative of public significance?

Unlawful Acquisition of the Tape

Gawker and other media outlets keep suggesting that Hogan knew he was being videotaped having sex with Heather Clem, but the evidence cuts the other way. Hogan has always been consistent in saying that he didn't know. Heather Clem corroborated that statement. Hogan's lawyer argued at length that the video had been made in violation of the Florida Video Voyeurism law. Sixth Judicial District Pinellas County Case No. 12012447-CT011, Transcript of Preliminary Injunction Hearing, Hon. A.M. Campbell (April 24, 2013). And there's that snippet of the video where Bubba Clem tells Heather that this tape is "their retirement." Conclusion: The video was created by deception with the intent to profit from Hogan's fame, and therefore was illegally made. Thereafter, the taint of its unlawful creation cannot be purged, and anyone who uses such a videotape has united their intention with that of the phony lover and her wretched spouse, the secret videographer. Gawker could only have used the tape by getting permission from Hogan and his sex partner. Gawker did not try to get permission, and knew the tape had been made and distributed without Hogan's consent.

Editing the Tape and Adding the Narrative Distorted the Truth

It's undisputed that the tape that people watched 7 Million times was not the one recorded by Bubba Clem. Rather, it was a clip less than two minutes long that Gawker called a "Highlights Reel." Now why did they do that? Because it makes the whole thing much more likely to be watched by people who are busy, and just want to see if it's really Hulk Hogan having sex. Because it makes it more like pornography. Because it objectifies the Hulk and his sex partner, making them seem more like disposable action figures that we can set into action and play for our pleasure. The editing  and the tasteless, horrible narrative written by A.J. Daulerio to accompany it, are not truthful depictions of what happened in the Hulk's tryst with Heather Clem. He didn't set out to make a porn tape. Even Bubba Clem didn't. Gawker did.

The Sex Tape and Narrative Were Not Sufficiently Significant to the Public to Justify the Invasion of Hogan's Privacy

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals posed a rhetorical question in a 1975 case [12]: "Does the spirit of the Bill of Rights require that individuals be free to pry into the unnewsworthy private affairs of their fellowmen?" The answer was in the negative: "In our view it does not [because] privacy must have the protection of law if the quality of life is to continue to be reasonably acceptable. The public's right to know is, then, subject to reasonable limitations so far as concerns the private facts of its individual members."

The media's invasion of a famous person's privacy isn't made lawful simply because the public is curious about everything they do. The Restatement of Torts explains where we draw the line on "determining what is of legitimate public interest" for purposes of the defense of newsworthiness:

"In determining what is a matter of legitimate public interest, account must be taken of the customs and conventions of the community; and in the last analysis what is proper becomes a matter of the community mores. The line is to be drawn when the publicity ceases to be the giving of information to which the public is entitled, and becomes a morbid and sensational prying into private lives for its own sake, with which a reasonable member of the public, with decent standards, would say that he had no concern. * * *"

Nor does the revelation of true facts by means of an invasion of privacy make the invasion lawful. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals explained why it does not:

"To hold that privilege extends to all true statements would seem to deny the existence of "private" facts, for if facts be facts -- that is, if they be true -- they would not (at least to the press) be private, and the press would be free to publicize them to the extent it sees fit. The extent to which areas of privacy continue to exist, then, would appear to be based not on rights bestowed by law but on the taste and discretion of the press. We cannot accept this result."

Based on these simple directives from the judiciary, that place a value on preserving a sense of decency and decorum in society, and protecting its members from outrageous revelations that can turn them into social pariahs overnight, it is hard to see where a legitimate newsworthiness defense can be presented to justify Gawker's act of turning a secretly filmed, objectively boring video into a piece of celebrity porn by means of editing and low-life promotional tactics.

The testimony of Gawker's own witness, former Editor in Chief A.J. Daulerio, was played at the Florida trial, and did the defendant no favors on the newsworthiness issue. Daulerio, no doubt thinking he sounded clever in New York, testified that he would not publish a sex tape of a four-year old, and explained that his "editorial litmus test" requires only two factors: "Is it true, and is it interesting?" And of course, he found the surreptitiously recorded video of a famous wrestler having sex with a radio announcer's wife so "interesting" that he introduced it to the world with this deep, engaging contemplation: "Because the Internet has made it easier for all of us to be shameless voyeurs and deviants, we love to watch famous people have sex."

Hogan put a journalism professor on the stand to testify that Gawker's publication of the video and Daulerio's narrative was not responsible journalism, was unduly intrusive, and violated journalistic ethics. The public's need to know, said Prof. Mike Foley of the University of Florida, would've been satisfied with an article. They didn't need to see the tape. That sounds right to me. I haven't seen the tape, and I've written this whole article. Predictably, the Ethics Chairman for the Society of Professional Journalists objected to Prof. Foley's testimony about journalistic ethics, emailing his cronies at media outlets to urge them to push this line: "The SPJ Code of Ethics is not relevant to whether an act is or is not legal. The words 'ethical' and 'legal' are not synonyms."

Yes, of course, we lawyers know very well the difference. We have been trained to teach our clients how to act both legally and unethically. However, in this case, Gawker and its editors had no interest in listening to lawyers. They've been teaching their lawyers to help them pretend that the law is what they want it to be. Thus, we have received this lovely journalistic gift that they devised for the delight of all: "newsworthy" porn.

Let's Make a Little Media History

Edward the Second spoke from experience. Historic events often ensue from the unseemly dramas that ensnare heroes and cause them to topple from the heights. Hogan's sufferings are big, way bigger than those of his fans, and because of his size, he's able to grapple with beasts too big for the likes of us. In this battle, humans must wish him luck, because Gawker, his foe, is a tax-dodging, human-exploiting corporate monster that has crippled and maimed reputations worldwide. Body-slam  that beast, Hulk! Take it down so it can't stand up.

 

_______________

Notes:

 1. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/hulk-hogan-gawker-100-million-legal-battle-37364319

2.  G. Epps, The Civil Right Heroes the Court Ignored in New York Times v. Sullivan
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/the-civil-rights-heroes-the-court-ignored-in-em-new-york-times-v-sullivan-em/284550/

3.  The other nine are Alaska (Art. 1, Sec. 22), Arizona (Art. II, Sec. 8), California (Art. 1, Sec. 1), Montana (Art. II, Sec. 10), Hawaii (Art. I, Sec. 7), Illinois (Art I, Sec. 6), Louisiana (Art. I, Sec. 5), Oregon (Art. I, Sec. 9, as interpreted by case precedent), and South Carolina (Art. I, Sec. 10), also explicitly declare this right. M.J. Gorman, Survey: State Search and Seizure Analogs, 77 Mississippi Law Journal 417 (Dec 1, 2007).

4.  The law of libel and defamation has become a specialty so recondite that only truly dizzying intellects can fathom it. To explore the profundities of the public figure doctrine as applied to the theory of privacy law, see S.M. Gilles, Public Plaintiffs and Private Facts: Should the "Public Figure" Doctrine Be Transplanted into Privacy Law? 83 Nebraska Law Review (2014) http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nlr/vol83/iss4/6

5. Most states have made “invasion of privacy” by private persons into a statutory claim that private parties can use to sue each other. It’s when the government gets all up in your business that you gotta start looking to the Constitution.

6.  Hon. B.F.Overton and K.E. Giddings, The Right of Privacy in Florida in the Age of Technology and the Twenty-First Century: A Need for Protection from Private and Commercial Intrusion
http://archive.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/251/overton.pdf

7. https://www.manatt.com/uploadedFiles/News_and_Events/Newsletters/AdvertisingLaw@manatt/Bollea v. Post Foods.pdf

8.  J.A. Johnson, The Right of Publicity and the Student-Athlete, 7 Elon Law Review 536, 537 (2015) https://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/law/law_review/Issues/Elon_Law_Review_V7_No2_Johnson.pdf

9.  Investigative filmmakers may have legitimate first amendment defenses for this kind of trickery, though. Think animal rights activists filming in slaughterhouses, and prison activists filming in jails and prisons.

10.  Hon. B.F. Overton and K.E. Giddings, The Right of Privacy in Florida in the Age of Technology and the Twenty-First Century: A Need for Protection from Private and Commercial Intrusion
http://archive.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/251/overton.pdf

11.  Florida Star v. BJF, 491 U.S. 524, 536 (1989)

12. Virgil v. Time, Inc., 527 F.2d 1122, 1128 (9th Cir. 1975).

Bibliography

1. Internet Law: Cases & Problems, by Grimmelman Internet Law

2. First Amended Complaint, Terry Gene Bollea vs. Heather Clem; Gawker Media, et al.

3. Motion for Temporary Injunction, Terry Gene Bollea vs. Heather Clem; Gawker Media, et al.

4. Opinion: Gawker Media, Appellant v. Terry Gene Bollea, et al., Appellees

5. Order: Plaintiff's Motion for Remand, Terry Gene Bollea v. Heather Clem, et al.

6. Public Plaintiffs and Private Facts: Should the "Public Figure" Doctrine Be Transplanted into Privacy Law?, by Susan M. Gilles

7. The Right of Privacy in Florida in the Age of Technology and the Twenty-First Century: A Need for Protection From Private and Commercial Intrusion, by Ben. F. Overton and Katherine E. Giddings

8.  The Right of Publicity and the Student-Athlete, by James A. Johnson