All good things must come to an end. Including Gawker.
“Gawker.com is shutting down today, Monday 22nd August, 2016, some 13 years after it began and two days before the end of my forties,” the site’s founder, Nick Denton, writes in the site’s official obituary published yesterday evening at 5:30 p.m. “It is the end of an era.”
Related: Nick Denton Destroys Retrograde Gay Billionaire Peter Thiel In Public Invitation To Debate
The post is basically a 4,500-word rant against Peter Thiel, the gay billionaire Republican responsible for bringing the gossip site down.
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“Peter Thiel has achieved his objectives,” Denton writes. “His proxy, Terry Bollea, also known as Hulk Hogan, has a claim on the company and my personal assets after winning a $140 million trial court judgment in his Florida privacy case.”
Denton goes on to explain that the site’s former editor, who wrote the original 2012 article about Hogan, has been financially ruined, as well, with “a $230 million hold on his checking account.”
“Peter Thiel has gotten away with what would otherwise be viewed as an act of petty revenge by reframing the debate on his terms,” Denton continues. “Having spent years on a secret scheme to punish Gawker’s parent company and writers for all manner of stories, Thiel has now cast himself as a billionaire privacy advocate, helping others whose intimate lives have been exposed by the press.”
He calls the entire thing “an act of destruction,” noting the site was hugely popular and profitable before Thiel launched his personal vendetta in the courts.
Related: 5 Reasons Peter Thiel’s Gawker Vendetta Is So Dangerous
“Gawker will be missed,” Denton writes. “But in dramatic terms, it is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think.”
Denton also explains what will become of Gawker‘s staff (they’re being assigned to other properties within Gawker Media Group, now owned by Univision) and praises all the wonderful things Gawker has achieved over the years (including pioneering online media, publishing over 200,000 “fearless” articles, and launching countless careers).
He concludes the obituary by pining for the days when freedom of the press was still a thing.
“At Gawker’s founding,” he writes, “there was a sense that the internet was a free space, where anything can be said. An island off the mainland, where people could be themselves. Where writers could say things that would get you fired in an instant from a print publication. Where you could say what you thought without fear of being fired, or sued out of existence.”
“That freedom,” Denton says, “was illusory.”
Related: Peter Thiel Believes Injecting Himself With The Blood Of The Young Will Help Him Live Forever
ymck
Good riddance to bad rubbish! Gawker and its brand of trashy pseudo-news will not be missed. WOOO HOOOO!!!!
Tobi
@ymck Hi Peter.
MacAdvisor
The real Gawker lesson is to carry insurance. Why this company didn’t have insurance to cover these sorts of judgments is beyond. Whoever buys the thing out of bankruptcy should sue the accounting firm and attorneys for not insisting on buying proper liability insurance. As a lawyer, only hospital bills moves someone into bankruptcy faster than a lack of liability insurance. This isn’t Thiel’s fault, it is the fault of bad management.
Hear that Queerty. INSURANCE!!!!
Xzamilio
Gawker is no victim and I don’t feel one iota of sympathy for Denton. I wish Jezebel had went down with Gawker.
Chris
And he turns out the lights not once acknowledging that, though Hogan was the proxy, it was Gawker’s invasion of Hogan’s privacy which led to its demise. Talk about hubris!
Evji108
@Chris: Actually it was the outing of Peter Thiel that led to his revenge attack by proxy using Hulk Hogan as a blunt instrument. Hulk Hogan had neither the deep pockets nor the expertise to mount such an attack.
Kangol
@MacAdvisor: Univision bought them. To reduce liabilities, they snuffed out Gawker. It was a rollicking site at times. I’ll miss it. Thiel can go chew on a sh!t-filled shoe!
BigWill
Denton’s a crybaby to the end. At the end of the day, Gawker had their day in court. Thiel didn’t buy the judgment; a judge and jury heard the case and determined that Gawker was wrong. Doesn’t matter who paid for the lawyers.
MarionPaige
@MacAdvisor: “The real Gawker lesson is to carry insurance. Why this company didn’t have insurance to cover these sorts of judgments is beyond.”
In addition to having a convoluted business structure that made it hard for people to sue it, Gawker has TWO insurance companies.
One of the legal strategies employed by Hogan’s lawyers was that they deleted certain language from Hogan’s lawsuit so as not to trigger a clause in Gawker’s insurance policy that would have required that the insurance company cover damage awards for deliberate malice towards someone done by a Gawker employee. In fact, it was the deletion of that language that tipped off Gawker that Hogan was after more than just money.
MarionPaige
BTW, there is a clause in Denton’s non-compete contract with Univision that pays Denton $200,000 per year for two years AND allows Denton to run some new internet business that Denton is trying to keep secret for now.
Chris
@Evji108: Hogan was a legitimate victim of Gawker’s style of journalism; and hence, he prevailed. Deep pockets and expertise were enablers of his victory. I agree that Theil was/is, at best, a questionable supporter of Hogan’s cause; but something about the “enemy of my enemy” comes to mind.
My point remains: Gawker’s hubris lies in its founder’s inability/unwillingness to admit that Hogan had a case.
newatl4
How can Queerty be supportive of Gawker’s conduct here and dismissive of the Radar Online conduct toward Will Smith, cited in an earlier post? A corollary of our right of privacy to engage in our consensual sexual conduct with whom we choose is our right to engage in that conduct within the privacy boundaries that we set. Our privacy is our property, and we are entitled to its control. That was true for Hulk Hogan, and that is true for Will Smith. The conduct of both Gawker (to Hogan) and Radar (to Smith) are the same. There is no justification for Queerty’s situational ethics to condone Gawker and criticize Radar.
Brian
Maybe people in the public eye shouldn’t make sex tapes. Keep it private, sweethearts. Nobody in their right mind wants to see you having sex, not even the flies on the proverbial wall.
Curtispsf
@newatl4: I couldn’t agree with you more. You may not like the result, for example: the KKK being allowed to espouse their venomous hatred in a parade down Main Street, but the principles need to be defended. The right to privacy should trump the right to disclose personal matters of who one sleeps with. Even if that person is a Republican.
Keebler ILF
@Evji108:
You shouldn’t have to have deep pockets to get justice in the courts.
Your comment just proves the point many commenters are making. Gawker
shouldn’t be allowed to do anything they want to people who they know
don’t have the money to stand up to them.
If Denton wants to argue that the amount awarded was way too much, then he might
get some sympathy.
dwes09
@Xzamilio: “there was a sense that the internet was a free space, where anything can be said. An island off the mainland, where people could be themselves. Where writers could say things that would get you fired in an instant from a print publication. Where you could say what you thought without fear of being fired, or sued out of existence.”
I guess you really don’t understand this. Jezebel, for one thing, is self-identified as a blog; by definition an opinion/analysis based site, not news. Those (and that apparently includes you) who wish to silence opinion simply because it runs counter to their opinion understand little about our bill of rights and what it provides. They ultimately side with Trump’s stated desire to litigate and erode freedom of the press. This goes way beyond the (supposed) invasion of privacy resulting from a (leaked, not stolen) sex tape. It will eventually kill protection for whistle blowers and allow corporations to control what is said about them (taken in tandem with the rights afforded to corporations in the citizen’s united decision).
Xzamilio
@dwes09: Oooh, look who used a thesaurus to deliver such a pretentious and condescending burn. Sweetness, the “Trump” trope is quickly replacing Hitler and nazism in Godwin’s law, as all one has to do is invoke Trump in another person’s comment to make them seem like are for lunacy and fascism. No, that’s your front… Gawker played loose and fast and lost, and I’m not losing a wink of sleep over their dismantlement.
And as for Jezebel, the irony of you defending them is not lost on me, especially after that spiel about silencing opinions that run counter one’s own, a tactic of that feminist online trash can. Go ahead… look at how they treat women who do no self-identify as feminists, hypocritically attempting to silence their voices and browbeating them into being feminists. Or seeks to demonize all aspects of the male existence by reducing straight men to penises with rapey urges he needs to control while not oppressing women with his cisgenderness and straightness and whiteness and penisness and ballsness.
Jezebel identifies as a blog the way Fox News identifies as entertainment: On paper. You don’t get to present yourself as the truth, and then hold up the “blog” card as though you’re absolved. Try again, ignoramus.
Last I checked, it was the “progressive” (read: regressive) groups no-platforming people with different opinions, creating petitions to get people removed from their positions, or lobbying for “hate speech” to be criminalized. Eat me.