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."

Comments

That happens all the time

[rsilvergun]

normally around that time the case is withdrawn, the two settle out of court and problem solved. Gawker knew what they were doing. It was a huge part of their job. Again, what they _didn't_ know is that Thiel was out for blood. If they had they would have shut the whole thing down and played nice with the judge.

Again, they thought it was a standard show trial. It wasn't. It was a well planned hit piece against one of the largest muckrackers in the business. Those muckrackers are generally the only ones that bring to light actually corruption. You think that bunch of milktoasts over at CNN would do that kind of work? MSNBC? They can't stop blathering about Russia. Fox had decades of _real_ corruption by Hillary Clinton they could have talked about but they waste their time with a pointless email scandal and crackpot conspiracy about Uranium that's easily disprove.

There's a reason the main stream media is basically useless for shining light on the cockroaches that run this joint. They're owned by those same cockroaches. Unless you can somehow get people to pay for investigative journalism without the muckracking (good luck with that) then this is how the sausage is made.