Gawker reaches $31M settlement with Hulk Hogan

LOS ANGELES — Gawker Media and its founder, Nick Denton, have settled litigation with Hulk Hogan over Gawker’s posting of a sex video of the wrestler, along with two other parties that sued the now-bankrupt digital media company.

Gawker offered Hogan $31 million to settle the $140 million jury award in the case, which came after Gawker.com in 2012 posted a video of the wrestler having sex with his best friend’s wife, the New York Times reported, citing documents filed Wednesday in Manhattan bankruptcy court.

Denton in a blog post confirmed that the settlements had been reached. “The saga is over,” he wrote. Under the terms of the agreement, three stories published by Gawker Media — the one about Hulk Hogan, a story about the claim by Shiva Ayyadurai that he invented email and a story about the feud between the founders of Tinder — are being removed from the web, according to Denton.

Previously, Denton and Gawker Media said they planned to appeal the verdict in the Hogan case along with the two other lawsuits, each of which were funded by PayPal’s billionaire founder and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel. In the blog Wednesday, Denton wrote that an “all-out legal war with Thiel would have cost too much, and hurt too many people, and there was no end in sight.”

As a result of the Hogan verdict, Gawker declared bankruptcy and initiated the process of selling its assets.

In August, Univision Communications acquired six of Gawker Media’s sites — Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Jezebel, Kotaku and Jalopnik — for $135 million. Those sites are now housed under Univision’s Gizmodo Media Group, overseen by ex-News Corp exec Raju Narisetti. Gawker.com ceased publishing on Aug. 22, but the site remains live.