Gawker Founder Nick Denton Files For Bankruptcy (nydailynews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New York Daily News: Gawker's founder Nick Denton filed for personal bankruptcy Monday after a Florida appeals court refused to give him an emergency order that would block wrestler Hulk Hogan from collecting on a $140 million jury verdict. The District Court of Appeal in Lakeland, Fla., denied a request by Gawker and Denton to stay a ruling by lower court judge Pamela Campbell -- who said Hogan could start collecting on his award immediately. But declaring bankruptcy will give Denton protection from collectors including Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea. In the filing, Denton says he has assets of $10 to $50 million and liabilities of $100 to $500 million. His debts includes $125 million that he owes to Hogan, an $11.5 million loan that he took out on June 10 from Silicon Valley Bank, a $50,000 loan he took from his 401(k) at Gawker and his Time Warner Cable bill for $120.88. The jury's March verdict was the result of Gawker's decision to publish a tape on the internet of Hogan having sex with a friend's wife. The former WWF star said it was an invasion of his privacy. Gawker filed for bankruptcy shortly after the jury's verdict, but Denton resisted, asking the bankruptcy court to protect him as part of the process. The federal court refused. Now that the Florida courts have opened the door for Hogan to start collecting from Denton, he is expected to follow Gawker into federal bankruptcy court in lower Manhattan.

Comments

Tough call

[mattyj]

That's a real Sophie's Choice trying to decide who to root for in this one. But in any case, you can't just post sex tapes online without consent from everyone in the actual tape. Remember that next time Kim Kardashian has a sex tape 'leaked' and somehow nobody gets sued over it.

Re:Tough call

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's a real Sophie's Choice trying to decide who to root for in this one.

Root against Peter Thiel. He is a hypocrite par excellence. He made a ton of money through silicon valley businesses that explicitly profit on user's privacy in ways the users do not expect. (He's on the board of Facebook, among others) And then, when he's incidentally "outed" by gawker in a larger article about pro-gay attitudes in silicon valley he loses his shit. Except he wasn't even outed, he'd come out in a profile piece in the new yorker back in 2003.

What's really going on is that Thiel was unhappy about his negative coverage in valleywag, in their reporting on things like the 6 billion dollars he lost trying to run a hedge fund at clarion capital. So he decided to kill gawker in retaliation. Which was really the only source of journalism covering silicon valley with anything less than hagiography.

Regardless of what you think about the publication of short clips from hogan's sex tape, that should not end their business. Its completely disproportionate. The lawyers that Thiel paid for deliberately structured their lawsuit so as to work around gawker's insurance coverage for such cases. If Hogan's well being was what mattered, they would have taken a route that guaranteed payment. Now all Hogan's getting is a place in line with gawker's other creditors in bankruptcy proceedings. A completely foreseeable result.

This case is all about a thin-skinned hypocrite billionaire using his money to silence critical coverage of his business dealings. Hogan was just the most handy tool. If he'd lost, Thiel would have just kept funding lawsuits until he got the same result one way or another.

So much for that flavor of the broken money model

[shanen]

The sad reality is that Gawker's broken economic model isn't that different from the the others, and ALL of the mass media (that I know about) is similarly broken. Gawker wanted lots of eyeballs to sell to advertisers, and the website just pushed the edge too hard in their quest for more eyeballs. They fell off, went boom.

The rest of the mass media is competing for eyeballs with Trump antics and disaster porn. Still the same quest for eyeballs to sell.

Gawker went one way, but only a minor difference that Trump has milked the free publicity all the way to the so-called Republican nomination. More serious difference when terrorists milk the free publicity. More like a death spiral on both sides. The mass media is killing itself trying to give the biggest and best free publicity to the terrorists, while the terrorists are killing other people and just trying to kill enough this time to get more publicity than last time.

Alternative economic model to address that last problem: Stop competing for eyeballs when that is supporting the terrorists. Set up a special non-competitive news office (SNCNO?) to handle such publicity-seeking manufactured news. If a story falls into the terrorism-support bucket, then this SNCNO will handle it. They will produce unified reports of the terrorism, and all of the mass media outlets will be allowed to use as much or as little of those reports as they want to. The reports will be accurate consensus of the news, but with no sensationalism or competitive considerations. This economic model would put the shoe on the other foot. Everyone would still need to report the real news, but there would be no incentive to play up the terrorism parts, and the incentive to compete for more eyeballs would be on the REAL news, not the fake manufactured news.

Other economic models available upon polite request. Too bad I don't have an economic model to sell them. They are just too intuitively obvious to the most casual observer (in the literal, not idiomatic, sense).

Uhhh

[Dunbal]

His debts includes $125 million that he owes to Hogan, an $11.5 million loan that he took out on June 10

IANAL but I think the bank that loaned him the money can probably nail him to the wall for fraud. It's one thing to take out a loan and go bankrupt, and quite another to take out a loan when you plan on declaring bankruptcy a month later. Any decent lawyer can probably make a case for intent to defraud here. Pretty sure he didn't specify this on his loan application...