SoylentNews

-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the people-with-excess-money-and-grudges dept.

Hulk Hogan's best friend filmed Hogan and Hogan's wife having sex. After Hogan and his friend had a falling out, that tape found its way to Gawker.

El Reg reports [theregister.co.uk]

Gawker edited the 30-minute tape down to one minute and posted it with a story that gave a mocking blow-by-blow account of the other 29 minutes. Hogan sued, asking for $100M in damages, and in March a jury decided in Hogan's favor. A judge issued [nypost.com] a $140M judgment against Gawker.

Hogan's legal team specifically dropped a part of his lawsuit that would have seen Gawker's insurance company pick up the tab. On top of which, Hogan reportedly turned down a $10M settlement offer from Gawker to stop the case going to court.

Increasingly, it looked as though, [rather than compensating Hogan,] the lawsuit's main focus was to ruin Gawker--which does not have $140M in assets and would have to declare bankruptcy if the judgment stands. [...] That led Gawker's CEO Nick Denton to wonder [nytimes.com] [Paywall [soylentnews.org]] whether someone else was behind the case.

[...]It didn't take much to figure it out. Peter Thiel has been the target of numerous attacks by Gawker in the past, in particular in its now-defunct Valleywag offshoot.

As a PayPal founder and early Facebook investor, Thiel is worth billions [and has many ideas [soylentnews.org] which diverge from those of the usual Silicon Valley billionaire.]

He also happens to be gay: something that is of no import in the San Francisco Bay Area, but which caused his first clash with Gawker when it wrote a story back in 2007 announcing his sexuality to the world before he had a chance to go public himself. The tabloid-style website was not exactly subtle, posting the story with the headline: "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people". [...] Denton later described how Thiel had threatened to bring down heaven and Earth on top of him if he wrote about his sexuality.

Gawker's response was typically robust. It continued to relentlessly mock him and his ideas, drawing reference to the topic that most irritated him at every available opportunity.

[...]While the allusions to Thiel being behind the Hogan lawsuit were not exactly subtle, it took a story in Forbes [forbes.com][1] [on May 24] to name him.

[1] Forbes won't allow [soylentnews.org] you to view their pages if you run an AdBlocker and the page that archive.is delivers [archive.is] looks pretty wack to me; maybe it's better for you.

Previous: Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit Against Gawker Media [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission