Hulk Hogan, my hero

To many people mourning him this week, Hulk Hogan was a larger-than-life super being, an outsized professional wrestling character with a singularly American persona. “I watched him lift 350-pound men over his head and throw them out of the ring,” President Trump said on Friday. 

I appreciate a good show as much as anyone, and have seen Rocky III many times. But I was never really a pro-wrestling guy. For me, Hulk Hogan is an important figure because he helped bring about the defeat of one of my life’s great villains: Gawker Media. 

Since only a couple of dozen people remember my personal drama with Gawker, I’ll provide a brief summary. In the 2000s, I was a semi-well-known writer, pivoting from doing satirical literature and journalism to goofy non-fiction about being a Gen X “hipster parent.” I published a light comic memoir called Alternadad, now out of print, and spent a lot of time and sweat unsuccessfully trying to turn it into a movie or TV series. 

I kept the Alternadad brand alive through blog posts or articles wherever I could get them published, and I wrote a piece for Epicurious, the food website, about taking my toddler son Elijah cheese shopping at a Whole Foods in Los Angeles. There’s nothing “alternative” about cheese shopping at Whole Foods, but I like cheese! A Gawker writer named Joshua David Stein latched onto this post, wrote something for the site that said my toddler son was going to be a “horror,” and then also created a fake commenter avatar for my son, who fakely claimed that I was emotionally abusing him. The readers piled on, there were mean follow-up posts, it got a ton of traffic. Frankly, it kind of broke my spirit, and the “Alternadad” brand never really recovered. 

I was a public figure, I deserved to take my lumps. But the attacks on my son were pointless and cruel. It took me years to claw out of the void that Gawker forced me to face. But I was powerless. They had been vile, but hadn’t done anything illegal. 

Enter Hulk Hogan. Terry Bollea’s shame was far worse than mine. He didn’t take his son cheese shopping. Gawker published a video of him having sex with the wife of his friend “Bubba the Love Sponge,” a radio shock-jock. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, whom Gawker had outed as gay in 2007, orchestrated a lawsuit, the story of which doesn’t need repeating here. 

A Florida court found Gawker Media guilty of crimes against journalism, Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan and humanity. The financial penalties from that verdict destroyed the millennial generation’s evilest media empire, scattering its scabrous minions to the darker corners of the internet. Some of the more talented and ambitious former Gawkerites have landed softly, while others flail about, trying to find a new home for their unrefined scurrilousness. 

The part that vindicated me the most came from this disgusting moment of the trial, an interview with  A.J. Daulerio, Gawker’s editor when they published the Hogan tape: 

Lawyer: Well, can you imagine a situation where a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy?

Daulerio: If they were a child.

Lawyer: Under what age?

Daulerio: Four.

That transcript caused the world to gasp. But I just nodded in recognition. It was definitely the Gawker I knew. 

A.J. Daulerio didn’t have anything to do with the attacks on me, as far as I remember, but my son was four and five years old when Gawker went after him, and me. Daulerio dedicated his life and work in the last decade to helping people recover from addiction, which I, as someone who struggles with addiction issues myself, can appreciate. But I don’t want amends from Gawker or anyone who was ever involved. Hulk Hogan suffered massive public humiliation, far beyond what Gawker ever did to me, but in the process he took a 350-pound media organization, which did great damage to my personal life and career, and threw it out of the ring. For as long as I live, which hopefully will be longer than any of my former Gawker enemies, real or imagined, the late Hulk Hogan will be my hero, and my son will never be a horror.