When Hulk Hogan faced off in court against the Web site Gawker, earlier this year, it was easy to become distracted by the rococo tawdriness of the spectacle. After all, the case centered on the leak of a surreptitiously videotaped sexual encounter between Hogan, the professional wrestler, and the wife of his erstwhile best friend, who is named Bubba the Love Sponge. The trial, which took place in St. Petersburg in March, laid out a sordid tale of betrayal and exposure, told mostly by Hogan, whose lavishly mustachioed visage remains one of the prominent faces of the sport of pro wrestling. (Hogan, who is now sixty-three, prefers to characterize wrestling as “sports entertainment,” because promoters stage matches in advance.) Even after the jury’s verdict—a gargantuan award of a hundred and forty million dollars, in Hogan’s favor—few saw the case as anything more than a bizarre outlier, of little relevance to anyone except its protagonists.

But the lawsuit seems destined to have an enduring afterlife, and not just because of the revelation that it had been secretly financed by a tech billionaire with a vendetta against Gawker. The verdict heralds a new era, in which judges and jurors see the ribald world of the Internet, rather than the staid realm of newspapers, as the dominant form of journalism. Since the nineteen-sixties, a series of Supreme Court precedents, most of them involving newspapers, have made libel cases very difficult to win, in part because plaintiffs bear the burden of proving that the stories about them are false. In these cases, the Court came close to saying, but never quite said, that publication of the truth was always protected by the First Amendment. But, in an age when Internet publishers can, with a few clicks, distribute revenge porn, medical records, and sex tapes—all of it truthful and accurate—courts are having second thoughts about guaranteeing First Amendment protection. Hulk Hogan conceded that Gawker’s story about him was true, yet he still won a vast judgment and, not incidentally, drove the Web site out of business. The prospect of liability, perhaps existential in nature, for true stories presents a chilling risk for those who rely on the First Amendment.

The Hogan case had another dimension that was equally ominous for media organizations. The courtroom battle took place as Donald Trump’s candidacy for President was accelerating, and it drew on some of the same political forces. Although for years Hogan had honed an image of himself as a lovably egomaniacal celebrity, his Tampa lawyers successfully presented him as a rugged Everyman who was victimized by a group of privileged snobs. On the campaign trail, Trump turned contempt for the media into a central part of his quest for the Presidency. At rallies, he used the people inside the penned press enclosures as foils and targets. Pointing to the journalists, Trump would call them “disgusting reporters,” “horrible people,” and “scum.” As President-elect, he has used his platform and his Twitter feed to tap a deep reservoir of cultural resentment against, among others, flag burners, the cast of “Hamilton,” and the staff of the Times.

In retrospect, Hogan v. Gawker in the courtroom looks in some ways like a dress rehearsal for Trump v. Clinton at the polls. In both contests, a star of reality television who initially became famous in another field portrayed himself as an embattled outsider confronting an unaccountable élite. In both, a wealthy and successful man played the victim. And on both occasions that man won a convincing and consequential victory.

Hulk Hogan was born Terry Gene Bollea. He grew up in a tough section of Tampa and toiled for years in wrestling obscurity under a variety of stage names, including Terry Boulder, the Super Destroyer, and Sterling Golden, before he became a star as Hulk Hogan, in the nineteen-eighties. At six feet seven, with a trademark yellow-and-red bandanna and white horseshoe mustache, Hogan became a pop-cultural phenomenon, instantly recognizable even to non-wrestling fans. His fame grew when he starred, for four seasons, in a reality-television show that chronicled life in the Tampa mansion that he shared with his wife, Linda, and their two children—Brooke, an aspiring singer, and Nick, a teen-ager. (Hulk and Linda’s marriage was troubled, and in later seasons the show’s cameras followed them into their counselling sessions.)

In the summer of 2007, Nick Hogan was the driver in a car accident in which a passenger was grievously injured. Nick’s responsibility (or lack thereof) for the crash became a controversial subject in Tampa, and Bubba Clem, a popular local radio personality who had legally changed his name to the Love Sponge, defended Nick on his program. Hogan and Bubba, longtime friends, bonded over the controversy, and the wrestler made many appearances on Bubba’s show. In the acknowledgments in Hogan’s autobiography, which was published in 2009, he thanks “the man who’ll take our antics to the grave and who’s always there no matter how heavy it gets, Bubba the Love Sponge. (No, Linda, we are not gay lovers).”

“Since you’re always asking, here’s a list of my various kinds of sighs, with explanations of what each one means.” Facebook

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On Bubba’s radio show, Hogan cultivated his image as an endearing rogue. Once, he told his host that if listeners would make Brooke’s new song No. 1 he would disclose the size of his penis. “You tell all your fans right now, keep Brooke at No. 1,” Hogan said, “and I’ll tell you how big the Loch Ness monster is.”

“How big your cock is,” Bubba replied. “I’ve seen it before. I know how big it is. . . . I would say hard, you’re probably seven and a half or eight inches.”

“Shit,” Hogan said.

“So, Hogan, you’re claiming to maybe have a ten-inch cock.”

“I’m not claiming,” Hogan answered. “Those are the facts, Jack.”

Bubba and his wife, Heather Clem, had an open marriage, and, over time, he encouraged Hogan to have sex with Heather. As Hogan later testified, he slept with Heather “three, maybe four” times, in 2007. Bubba had placed security cameras in and around his house, including the bedroom, and he taped his wife’s sexual encounters with his best friend, apparently without Hogan’s permission. In the spring of 2012, rumors about the existence of a sex tape, and then screen grabs from the video, began appearing on various Web sites. In September, 2012, someone—it’s never been entirely clear who—mailed a DVD to A. J. Daulerio, who was then the editor of Gawker. The video on the disk included about thirty minutes of Hogan and Heather having sex. Hulk and Linda later divorced, as did Bubba and Heather.

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, which grew to encompass a network of Web sites, often described his journalistic philosophy as “radical transparency.” In less highfalutin terms, Gawker liked to show people having sex. Sometimes the people were famous, like Hulk Hogan, but often the subjects were unknowns, who happened to be caught in embarrassing situations. The videos were accompanied by headlines and text that evinced a distinct sensibility—ironic, knowing, smug. Gawker viewed the human comedy with a sneer. Denton’s professed goal was to tear asunder the establishment’s secret arrangements and self-dealing, to explode hypocrisies. The site displayed special contempt for the mainstream news media, a project that Denton called “covering the death agonies of Manhattan’s old-line media industry, without much respect for the club’s cozy rules.”