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Kiwi billionaire Peter Thiel secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against an online US news site after it published a sex tape of the former wrestling star. 

Hogan, otherwise known as Terry Bollea, died in Clearwater Beach, Florida overnight aged 71 after emergency personnel responded to a call for a cardiac arrest. 

He was rushed to Morton Plant Hospital where he was pronounced dead, Clearwater police said. 

In 2016, a Florida jury awarded Hogan a nine-figure sum for invasion of privacy over a sex tape published online by American media website Gawker in 2012. 

His lawsuit against the controversial blog was secretly backed by Thiel, an early investor in Facebook as well as New Zealand’s high-flying tech stock Xero, who was years earlier outed as being gay by Gawker. 

In 2007, Gawker published an article targeting the billionaire with the headline: “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”. 

“Thiel, who is now open about his sexual orientation, once described the Gawker-owned site Valleywag as, ‘the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda’,” the New York Times later wrote. 

Hogan was awarded US$140 million ($232.2m) in damages in June 2016, which saw Gawker file for bankruptcy months later. Hogan eventually reached a US$31m ($51.4m) settlement with Gawker Media. 

Thiel, now 57, told the New York Times in 2016 he funded Hogan as a means of going to battle with Gawker in response to their stories, saying he believed many of their targets were defenceless and unable to fight back. 

“Gawker, the defendant, built its business on humiliating people for sport,” he said in a statement. 

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“They routinely relied on an assumption that victims would be too intimidated or disgusted to even attempt redress for clear wrongs. Freedom of the press does not mean freedom to publish sex tapes without consent. I don’t think anybody but Gawker would argue otherwise.” 

Boella v. Gawker was the subject of a Netflix documentary, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press in 2017 and a 2018 book by Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue. 

Thiel was born in Germany but moved to America when he was only a year old. He became a New Zealand citizen in 2011. 

“I am happy to say categorically that I have found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand,” Thiel wrote. 

His citizenship became a minor national scandal in 2017 when the Ombudsman revealed that the billionaire had only spent 12 days in the country, less than 1% of the usual criteria. 

Benjamin Plummer is an Auckland-based reporter for the New Zealand Herald who covers sport and breaking news. He has worked for the Herald since 2022.