It was Gawker, not Hulk Hogan or Peter Thiel, which struck fear into the hearts and minds of people for years.
#Gawker bathroom stall video free
Much of the commentary focuses on a hypothetical chill to free speech that the lawsuit might inflict. Each masthead argued the same thing: that Gawker was distasteful – yes – but that a billionaire funding a lawsuit against a media company was “worrisome”, and that the funding of this lawsuit would set a “dangerous precedent”. Never has the disconnect between journalists and ordinary readers been so starkly illustrated, with the same limp and homogenized arguments being published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardianand even The New Yorker. In contraposition with the public, however, was the reaction of the media. When the news of Thiel’s involvement broke, Twitter erupted in celebration with #ThankYouPeter briefly trending. It’s less about revenge and more specifically about deterrence…I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest. In an interview with the New York Times, he said that he helped Terry Bollea (Hogan) so that it would serve as a deterrent to other rogue media companies: But revenge was not the primary reason why Thiel funded the lawsuit. Thiel has every reason to disdain the company – its subsidiary Valleywag invaded his own privacy in 2007. This was hitherto unknown, even to Nick Denton, who responded to the news by penning a desperate open letter to the billionaire begging him to stop. It was also revealed last week that PayPal Founder and Venture Capitalist, Peter Thiel, was bank-rolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker the entire time it was running. “If they were a child,” Daulerio replied. “Can you imagine a situation where a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy?” (asked Douglas E. A deposition of Daulerio was also shown at the trial. In Hulk Hogan’s court case, details emerged of Gawker’s editor-in-chief Albert J Daulerio mocking a college girl who had begged the company’s editors to remove a video of her being sexually assaulted in a bathroom stall. When that failed, he went to Gawker, and Gawker ran the story. It turned out that the escort had attempted to blackmail the executive.
Less than a year ago, Gawker ran a bizarre expose about a thwarted tryst between an unknown business executive and a male escort. In 2015, The Daily Beast reported that the online magazine belligerently hounded actor James Franco for years even going so far as to accuse him of being a “gay rapist”. Gawker Media has tormented both powerful and not so powerful people for some time now. It is the parent company of several different blogs including the infamous pop-feminist rag Jezebel and the much maligned Valleywag and Kotaku. Gawker Media is an online media company owned by Nick Denton, based in New York City and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. In March this year, Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan), was awarded $140 million in damages in an invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media.