12/10/2023 0 Comments Bollea v. gawker media![]() It is worth noting that, had Clem been the one suing Gawker, she almost certainly would not have qualified as a public person, despite being married to Tampa Bay area micro-celebrity and shock jock Bubba “the Love Sponge” Clem, and much of Gawker’s newsworthiness defense would likely be moot. Gawker’s defense is that the information was both truthful – as the video aptly demonstrated, Bollea and Heather Clem did have sex – and newsworthy given Bollea’s celebrity and his previous denials of the events depicted, and thus protected by the first amendment to the US constitution. He later added copyright infringement to the suit, having obtained copyright from the original owner. Bollea’s lawyers asked them to remove the footage, they refused and Bollea eventually sued Gawker, its majority owner Denton, and Daulerio in state court for “(1) invasion of privacy by intrusion upon seclusion, (2) publication of private facts, (3) violation of the Florida common law right of publicity, (4) intentional infliction of emotional distress, and (5) negligent infliction of emotional distress”. In October 2012 Gawker published just under two minutes of footage from the 30-minute sex tape they received from an anonymous source, accompanied by some sharp-toothed commentary and a play-by-play of the full tape from Daulerio, the editor at the time. ![]() Six jurors are being asked to consider whether the first amendment protects Gawker’s right to publish a video that showed Bollea engaging in sex acts with another person, unaware he was being recorded.Īt issue in the Gawker case is whether the publication of the Bollea footage is both newsworthy enough that it trumps Bollea’s civil right to privacy (even as a public figure) under Florida common law and whether it is “highly offensive to a reasonable person” – the two common-law guidelines for establishing civil liability written in the Restatement of Torts in 1977. The law, as University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor Robert Drechsel said, “tends to get hashed out in extreme cases, not easy cases” – and this, he said, “is a bizarre case” that could, eventually, affect the latitude generally afforded American publishers by the courts. But, as Tulane University law professor Amy Gajda said, while a lot of people in the United States “believe that they have the right to publish any truthful information” under the constitution, the truth and American law are more complicated – and getting ever more so in the digital age. Everyone knows – or thinks they know – what the first amendment protects. The battleground, as ever, is over the first amendment, America’s broad and powerful protection of free speech.
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