Real American is formatted chronologically, so it doesn’t get to Bollea’s 2013 lawsuit against Gawker Media for releasing a sex tape made by a former friend to blackmail the wrestler until about halfway through the fourth and final episode. When it does get there, it moves on in a hurry. Director Bryan Storkel only devotes a few minutes to the lawsuit and its 2016 trial. The only person he and producer Amy Storkel interview about it—outside of Hogan, his family, and the wrestling industry—is Hogan’s lawyer, Ken Turkel. The documentary barely gets into the details of the case, with a one-sided summary of the central issue of freedom of the press vs. personal privacy, and then immediately moves on to the racism scandal that broke in the wake of the trial. It never mentions that the lawsuit was funded in part by billionaire and conservative activist Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and a Silicon Valley titan. Thiel funded other lawsuits against Gawker in retaliation to a 2007 Valleywag article that publicly outed him as gay, but it’s the Hogan lawsuit, and the $140 million verdict in the wrestler’s favor, that forced Gawker Media to close and sell its assets to Univision in 2016. Thiel, of course, is a crucial figure in the tech industry’s rightward shift; he’s a major Trump supporter, J.D. Vance’s mentor and benefactor, and somebody who apparently believes AI skepticism and global unity are the work of the Antichrist. (Ironic that somebody who gives lectures that sound suspiciously close to the New World Order conspiracy theory would underwrite the leader of wrestling’s NWO.)
Univision bought the entire Gawker Media family of websites except for Gawker itself, forming a new company called Gizmodo Media Group in 2016. That same year Univision also acquired The Onion, which included The A.V. Club. In 2019, Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion were bought by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, which combined the two into G/O Media; after a period of mismanagement and neglect, G/O started selling sites off in 2023, selling The A.V. Club to current owners Paste Media in 2024.
The Thiel lawsuit isn’t Hogan’s only brush with politics in the last decade, of course. After decades of remaining non-partisan he officially endorsed Donald Trump in 2024, campaigning for him and speaking at that year’s Republican National Convention. Trump himself appears in Real American, finding time for an interview for a wrestling documentary while serving as president—something Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a board member of WWE’s parent company TKO Group Holdings and a third-generation pro wrestler raised in the business, didn’t do. So if you’re wondering: Yes, The Rock’s time is more valuable than the President’s.
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