![]() ![]() And what’s wild about the Peter Thiel revelation, and when that started to snap into focus a little bit, was that, should this have meant the death penalty for Gawker? That’s when it becomes kind of a different story. Is there room to think that everyone here is wrong? The guys at Gawker and Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel? The real motivations were just not known. It made the whole thing - I don’t know if I felt differently about the participants so much as it felt like there was a bit of Kabuki theater going on, up to that point. But the Peter Thiel revelation made it something different. It’s clearly at the fringes of acceptability. I think this case was complicated, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I found it so compelling. Let’s put it this way: I had some empathy for Hulk Hogan’s case in the trial itself. Gawker Media founder Nick Denton attends Hulk Hogan’s trial against Gawker Wednesday, March 9, 2016, in St. He saw it as a dangerous precedent-setting tactic for the wealthy who would prefer truth not be spoken to their power, a strategy that, as he put it, Thiel probably sees as an “innovation.” This in no way contradicted his belief in a free press, Thiel insisted, because Gawker was a special case: “It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.”īrian Knappenberger, director of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz and We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, was riveted by the Gawker trial and unnerved by its result. “Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully,” Thiel told the New York Times, so was deserving of this special treatment. The site was dead.Īnd while at first it seemed like the death blow was delivered by Bollea alone, it came out shortly after the verdict that Bollea had a backer: Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley billionaire and subject of a Gawker story from 2007 that (probably) everyone had forgotten about except for him, titled “ Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel gripped that grudge like a toddler with a teddy bear and then, in secret, sponsored Bollea’s lawsuit with the intention of blowing Gawker to smithereens. And in a Florida courtroom, Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) was awarded an astonishing $ 115 million in damages - $15 million more than he asked for and many millions more than Gawker could possibly afford. Hulk Hogan, one of the most successful WWE stars of all time, got caught on tape having sex with the wife of his best friend, a man whose radio persona was Bubba the Love Sponge this tape was leaked to Gawker, where an edited clip of it played and played and played, played through the cease-and-desist letter from Hogan’s lawyer, until Hogan sued Gawker for invasion of privacy. Everything about the trial seemed too absurd to be real. ![]()
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