As soon as it was announced that Hulk Hogan had come to terms on a $31 million settlement of his lawsuit against Gawker, wrestling fans immediately began speculating about his return to WWE. Fueling the fire, Brooke Hogan told TMZ that her dad is already in negotiations to return at WrestleMania 33, while on last week’s Bauer and Pollock podcast, Court Bauer reported that Hogan has recently been taping talking head segments for WWE Network programming. The idea of the latter is that whenever they air, it’s under the radar enough that WWE can ease into bringing Hogan back, plus viewers don’t really know when those clips are filmed, anyway.
Having said all that, it’s not as if settling the sex tape lawsuit is/was the only hurdle for Hogan’s return. After all, it was, in and of itself, never the issue. The Gawker post didn’t hurt his career; last year’s National Enquirer article revealing his racist comments on a different sex tape (I subsequently located the audio for some of it in April) did. While they’re connected and the lawsuit being settled does chip away at the legs of the racist comments story, the settlement (if approved by the bankruptcy and trial judges) may not be the end for a few reasons.
The biggest is that Hogan still has a lawsuit outstanding that’s centered on the original leak of the racist comments. Filed in May in the same court as the Gawker lawsuit, it named not just the now-bankrupt blog empire (which Hogan alleged was the Enquirer’s source despite no compelling evidence), but also everyone who he believes was involved with the original sex tape leak to Gawker as well as a subsequent extortion attempt using all of the videos as bait. If that lawsuit keeps going, it’s going to keep the topic of his racist comments in the public eye for as long as the case lasts.
So is it gonna keep going?
That’s hard to say right now. Obviously the claim against Gawker, which was tenuous in the first place, is being dropped soon. When reached for comment, Gawker attorney Rachel Fugate said she had “no clue” if Hogan would be dropping the case against the other defendants. Charles Harder, Hogan’s lead attorney on the Gawker cases, did not return a request for comment. So it likely comes down to this: Did Hogan file the second lawsuit as part of the deal with Peter Thiel to drive Gawker out of business (with the others as collateral damage, albeit people who Hogan had no problem suing), or would he have pursued this case regardless?
While it ramped up after he started needing money in the aftermath of his son’s car wreck and his first wife filing for divorce, Hogan has been a very litigious man for going on two decades now. Ever since he filed an extortion lawsuit against the woman he sued him alleging that he sexually assaulted her the weekend before the first episode of Monday Nitro, he’s been relented. Last year, Amanda Hess wrote this in an article about the sex tape case at Slate:
Hogan is easily aggrieved. When a woman accused him of sexual battery, he sued her; when his ex-wife Linda alleged domestic abuse in her memoir, he sued her; when a series of back surgeries stopped Hogan from inking a last-hurrah wrestling contract, he sued the surgeon; when his auto insurance failed to cover the cost of his tipsy teenage son recklessly driving his sports car into a tree, causing permanent brain damage to a passenger, Hogan sued his insurance company; when that didn’t work, he sued Linda, too, for not forcing him to be better insured; when Hogan’s lawyers sent the bill for their services, he sued them as well.
That’s definitely missing plenty of cases, too. So it’s easy to make an argument for why he would continue to pursue the second lawsuit, but it’s just as easy to argue that it was primarily part of the plan to sink Gawker. The only mark against the latter is that if Hogan’s lawyers foresaw Gawker filing bankruptcy a month after they filed the suit (and it’s starting to look more and more like they did), then the second lawsuit was unlikely to push them further in that direction.
Until they know for sure whether or not this case is going away, though, it’s likely too risky for WWE to bring Hogan back as a an actual character, and not just a talking head on canned streaming shows. If the case is still going, then Hogan’s racist comments will literally be an ongoing issue in the public record until the case is resolved.