Jurors didn't buy arguments that the First Amendment protected Gawker's right to humiliate random celebrities by publishing video of their most intimate moments. "Under what age?" the lawyer asked.Īs a result, arguments about media freedom fell on deaf ears in the jury box.
"If they were a child," replied the editor, Albert Daulerio. At one point, one of Hogan's lawyers asked a former Gawker editor if there were any situation in which a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy. In court, Hulk Hogan's lawyers sought to portray Gawker as an organization without a moral compass. The video of Hogan having consensual sex with the wife of a radio shock jock (who arranged the encounter and made the videotape) had no obvious news value, but Gawker decided to publish it anyway. Still, the Hogan video represented a new low for Gawker. "It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," Thiel told the Times on Wednesday, indicating he viewed his funding of lawsuits as bigger than just its previous posts about him. A 2007 post called "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people" apparently marked the start of Thiel's vendetta against the site. In 2013, Gawker reported that Fox News anchor Shepard Smith was romantically involved with a male staffer.Īnd one of the early targets of Gawker's outing campaign was Peter Thiel. Gawker was one of the first to report that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was gay in 2009. Outing gay people is something of a specialty for the digital gossip rag.
The piece was later removed after founder Nick Denton decided that the story had gone over the ethical line. In one of its most infamous stories, Gawker reported on a New York media executive soliciting the services of a male escort. Revealing certain kinds of information - especially about people who are not public figures - can get a media organization trouble.Īnd Gawker exercises this freedom more aggressively than most other media organizations. One of the key constraints is personal privacy. But US media organizations don't have unlimited freedom. The First Amendment gives American media organizations greater latitude than they enjoy in most other developed countries. The ruling is still being appealed, but if it's upheld it could put Gawker Media - which publishes sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo in addition to Gawker itself - out of business. In March 2016, a jury awarded Hogan $140 million in damages. Hogan said the video was taken without his knowledge or consent, and he sued Gawker for invasion of privacy.
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In 2012, Gawker published a video of former professional wrestler Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea having sex. Photo by John Pendygraft-Pool/Getty Images Thiel was outraged by Gawker's cavalier attitude toward privacy Gawker Media founder Nick Denton. For centuries, he argues, courts in the United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere recognized that wealthy people could use third-party lawsuits as a weapon against those they disliked - and had rules in place to prevent this power from being abused.īut laws limiting this kind of third-party involvement have fallen out of favor in recent decades, opening the door for billionaires like Thiel to use their vast resources to wage war on people they don't like.
"The law used to disapprove of this kind of arrangement," says Walter Olson, a legal expert at the Cato Institute. Thiel, in other words, sees his lawsuit as a public-spirited attempt to enforce norms of decency and respect for personal privacy.īut whatever you think of the merits of the particular lawsuit against Gawker, critics warn that this kind of arrangement - where a wealthy person funds third-party lawsuits against a common foe - is ripe for abuse. I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations." "The way I’ve thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. "It’s not like it is some sort of speaking truth to power or something going on here," Thiel argued. The story was first reported by Forbes and confirmed by Thiel himself in a Wednesday interview with the New York Times. This week we learned that billionaire Peter Thiel, who made his fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, has been bankrolling a lawsuit that could drive Gawker Media out of business.