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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.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!
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.
Maybe he's making a move into politics. I don't consider a candidate to have the right credentials to run our great nation unless they've been through bankruptcy a few times.
Denton says he has assets of $10 to $50 million and liabilities of $100 to $500 million. His debts includes...a $50,000 loan he took from his 401(k) at Gawker and his Time Warner Cable bill for $120.88...
Was there a point in listing a $120 cable bill as a liability for a man allegedly worth millions? I hope they didn't forget to count that Starbucks gift card he got for Christmas with his assets. Fucking seriously...
This wasn't a First Amendment issue at all. You have no right to publish video footage of people having sex unless you have their permission.
I wonder how you'd feel about a live feed of you masturbating beamed into your mom's house? Thought so.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
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...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is all about Peter Theil, who is bankrupting Hogan's case.
That's not why Hogan sued at all, but more importantly Peter Theil is funding the whole thing in retrobution for Gawker outing him as gay around 2008 (while he was funding GOP which has anti-gay policies).
Gawker outed Theil because he was a hypocrite.
Hogan sued about another video.
Here's an explanation:
Thank you Dave Raggett
The Hogan lawsuit was paid for by Peter Thiel, whom Gawker/Denton dared to cross.
Bottom line is: death to independent journalism and all money to the already wealthy and powerful. Think what you're told to think via the pre-approved breadcrumbs of information allowed for you by a handful of one-percenters. This is hand-in-glove with the willful destruction of public education in red states, as an ignorant populace is a controllable populace.
USA! indeed.