With a hearing scheduled for tomorrow to address some disagreements about what deposition testimony can be used during the trial, there were hopes that jury selection in the trial of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker would end today. It didn’t, as they didn’t have a jury as of 5:00 p.m. local time, so it looks like tomorrow’s going to be a marathon day for Hogan and his lawyers. As for the jury selection process, it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it was yesterday, but still had many strangely entertaining moments.
As noted by ABC Chief Legal Correspondent Dan Abrams in the above video from Good Morning American, jury selection in this case is tricky because both sides more or less agree on the facts of the case. As a result, this jury is going to be interpreting the law: Hulk Hogan needs jurors who are outraged, while Gawker needs jurors who are vociferous defenders of First Amendment rights, especially since Abrams feels their argument is better suited for an Appeals Court than a jury.
The jury selection here, as in most televised trials (the trial proper be streamed online when it starts this Monday, March 7th) is not televised, so what you’re reading here is mostly sourced from the Twitter feeds of CNN’s Tom Kludt. Here are some of today’s highlights:
- Gawker issued this statement as the jury selection started for the day: “We are defending the First Amendment against Hulk Hogan’s effort to create a world where celebrities can promote themselves around any topic, in this case sex, and then veto how the media covers their lives. This tape shows Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife, and in fact the tape was made by his best friend Bubba who also appears in the video. Hulk Hogan bragged about his sex life for years, denied this particular sexual encounter, and now thinks his own choices are worth $100 million somehow.”
- Actual quote from one of Hogan’s lawyers: “Show of hands, how many of you watch ‘SVU’?”
- Kludt described Kenneth Turkel, a member of Hulk Hogan’s legal team, as “really yucking it up with the potential jurors”
- One female juror had never really heard of Hogan before this week’s process started. She wouldn’t have recognized him out in public and “just knew he was a fighter of some sort,” but not if he was a boxer or a wrestler.
- When the prospective jurors in the room were asked if they had any negative biases against Hogan coming into this process, nobody raised their hand.
- One lawyer (I believe for Hogan) asked, half-jokingly, if any potential jurors were upset by Hulk Hogan body slamming Andre the Giant or turning heel to join the NWO and become Hollywood Hogan.
- A male potential juror felt that Hogan was “not serious enough” about his son Nick’s car wreck (which caused severe brain damage to passenger John Graziano), but still felt he could be impartial.
- Only five of the 91 potential jurors there had heard of Gawker.
#hulkvsgawk pic.twitter.com/9L3e6hMzhf
— Tom Kludt (@TomKludt) March 3, 2016
- When asked about the limits of media, Potential Juror #4 said that ”the New York Times gets away with a lot of stuff politically that they aren’t held accountable for.” Then they talked about Howard Stern.
- The lawyers conferred at the bench and the sound in the media room was turned off when a female potential juror said that she felt uneasy serving on a jury in a case about a sex tape due to “personal experiences.”
- One woman said that it would be impossible for her to be impartial because “It goes against my personal beliefs, and my relationship with Jesus Christ.”
- Another female potential juror on the sex tape: “Do I want to look at it? No. Am I willing to, as a citizen? Yes.”
- One male potential juror cracked a joke: “Unfortunately I had no excuse to not be here.”
- One of Hogan’s attorneys (I believe Kenneth Turkel) asked THIS: “NSFW. How many of you are familiar with that acronym?”
- No potential jurors were familiar with Gawker founder Nick Denton or former editor (as well as writer of the Hogan article) A.J. Daulerio. They’re co-defendants with Gawker as a company. Gawker’s lawyer joked that they need to talk to their public relations staff.
- When asked about Gawker’s other websites, one man said he reads Jezebel, their women’s issues site. None of them read Kotaku, Gawker’s video game site.
- 36 potential jurors were dismissed at 5:00 p.m., with 70 returning tomorrow for the final jury selection. Nine of the 70 will be picked.
We’ll have more tomorrow, and in-depth coverage starts with opening arguments this Monday, March 7th. We’ll also have a guide to everything that’s going on in the case by the end of the weekend.
