On the eve of Gawker Media’s sale to … somebody, the author of its bankruptcy, Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel, was graciously given op-ed space in the New York Times to lay out his case against the blog network. Thiel spent roughly $10 million bankrolling Hogan’s suit, which he said was about “deterrence” after Gawker’s “bullying”.
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Thiel’s fight with Gawker has its roots in a 2007 post on one of the company’s blogs that was the first to publicly discuss the fact that he identifies as gay.
The piece was published just hours after news surfaced that Gawker would be putting itself up for auction this week.
In March, a United States jury in Florida ordered that wrestling star Hogan be allowed to collect $140 million in total compensation after Gawker published a videotape of him having sex with a friend’s wife.
“In my case, Gawker decided to make those choices for me”, he added.
“It is ridiculous to claim that journalism requires indiscriminate access to private people’s sex lives”, Thiel said. I had begun coming out to people I knew, and I planned to continue on my own terms. “Instead, Gawker violated my privacy and cashed in on it”, Thiel wrote.
“A free press is vital for public debate”, Thiel wrote.
“Gawker founder Nick Denton is said to favor the Ziff Davis bid-in part because the deal involves him staying on as a consultant to the company. And yes, it’s disturbing to live in a world in which a billionaire can bully journalists because he didn’t like the coverage”.
Thiel recently baffled some of his Silicon Valley compatriots by speaking at the Republican National Convention in support of Donald Trump’s presidential bid.
Thiel was a founder of the online payments firm PayPal, and served as its chief executive before it was sold to eBay.
Notwithstanding Gawker’s sometimes questionable news judgment, Thiel’s quest to effectively sink the media organization creates a unsafe precedent for billionaires interested in quashing unfavorable coverage, journalists and press freedom advocates argue.
Perhaps the oddest part of Thiel’s essay is during its endorsement of the Intimate Privacy Protection Act, a bill pending before Congress which “would make it illegal to distribute explicit private images, sometimes called revenge porn, without the consent of the people involved”.
“It’s not for me to draw the line, but journalists should condemn those who willfully cross it”, Thiel wrote. While saying “It’s not for me to draw the line”, that does feel a lot like what Thiel did, exerting his financial might.
A filing in federal bankruptcy court in NY lists Gawker assets in a range of $50 million to $100 million, and liabilities between $100 million and $500 million.
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Now, with dozens of publishing companies having expressed interest, and with all bids due by the end of the business day on Monday, we will find out who will end up buying Gawker Media before the end of the week.
