And that's surely in the spirit of the transparency Gawker was founded to promote. If there is a lasting legacy from this experience, it should be a new awareness of the danger of dark money in litigation finance.
#Hulk hogan gawker case trial#
"It's a shame the Hogan trial took place without the motives of the plaintiff's backer being known. Perhaps that is the lasting legacy of this whole sad debacle. It costs too much."įor Thiel, an investor in Facebook and Palantir, the Hogan case probably cost him less than 1% of his net worth to fund, Denton estimated. As he told the National Press Club: "If you're middle-class, if you're upper-middle class, if you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system. Thus Thiel hit them where he could, in the pocketbook, bankrolling court cases from the shadows because, in his esteem, Hogan was too poor to prevail in the court system alone.
The billionaire appointed himself a First Amendment gatekeeper: At a National Press Club Q&A on Monday, Thiel told reporters that Gawker's employees were not journalists and didn't deserve Constitutionally-bound right of freedom of the press.Įxcept, they do, because the law of the land says so. But the specter of Thiel's then-secret machinations to bring down a media company that crossed him remain. All the writers involved, including him, can move on. So the saga is over, as Denton wrote in his post. Shed of the Gawker site and name, the newly-branded Gizmodo network (including Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Deadspin) can forge ahead under ownership by Univision. Daulerio, who was also named a defendant in the case, will be able to proceed. Instead of extending the litigation, Hogan will retire comfortably and the article's writer A.J. Denton was convinced that Thiel would continue dragging the fight out and even likely fund other cases if the media company won its appeal, as the billionaire said he would do in a New York Times op ed.īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy.īut the other big reason to settle the four-year case: Everyone needs to move on. The tech billionaire had bankrolled Harder to take on Hogan's case, spending his own money to avenge Gawker's outing him as gay in 2007.
They didn't pursue the appeals process due to the large financial elephant in the room: Peter Thiel. Here’s a breakdown of Hogan’s court case vs. In addition to the financial payouts, the settlement requires Gawker to take down all three posts, which Denton called "the most unpalatable part of the deal." RT snfights: Hulk Hogan’s greatest opponent may not have been Andre the Giant or Sting, but Gawker. As part of the settlement, Gawker will pay him $750,000.ĭetails of Gawker's settlement /KXls7dmt8m Of the other lawsuits, one sought damages for a piece slamming Shiva Ayyadurai for his claim of inventing email. The four-year legal battle stretched resources, such that appealing both the Hogan case and his lawyer Charles Harder's other two cases involving Gawker stories would exhaust more time and money. Gawkers latest privacy scandal poses dilemma in 100m Hulk Hogan lawsuit Nick Denton, who is named in a suit over a sex tape of Hogan posted by Gawker, will have a harder time under. In a blog post, Denton explained the rationale behind the lower number: In short, everyone needs to move on. But today, the media company's cofounder and CEO Nick Denton announced that they've settled with the celebrity for $31 million.
#Hulk hogan gawker case professional#
God knows there are enough current threats to journalism to fill several more hours of frightening, enraging, protest-inspiring docs.Since Gawker lost its court battle with Hulk Hogan back in June and filed for bankruptcy, it's been unclear just how much the former professional wrestler would get given the massive $140 million judgment awarded him. But while it fits the bigger goals of this film, it is stuck uncomfortably into the middle of the Hogan/ Thiel/ Gawker narrative, suggesting that Nobody Speak might work better as a miniseries than a feature. This is a frightening narrative that, unlike the other, boasts heroes - reporters who risked their careers to stand up for journalistic principles. A long episode chronicles the sad fate of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, whose staff was shocked in 2015 to find that Sheldon Adelson, a gaming magnate who had often been a target of their reporting, had bought the paper, seemingly as a way to silence stories he didn’t want published.
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