There’s not a whole lot of difference between a tech billionaire who quietly financed a major lawsuit against the left-leaning Gawker website and the efforts made to silence coverage of the Civil Rights movement more than 50 years ago, according to a column published this week by the Washington Post.
In fact, the financing of the sex tape lawsuit by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is a tactic taken directly from anti-Civil Rights activists, it charged.
Thiel admitted last month that he put up nearly $10 million to bankroll Hulk Hogan’s sex tape lawsuit against Gawker. The money helped Hogan sue Gawker after it published a surreptitiously recorded video in 2012 featuring the wrestler and his former friend’s now-ex-wife.
Thiel, who Gawker outed as gay in 2007, explained that his reasons for supporting the invasion of privacy lawsuit case were personal.
“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” the libertarian entrepreneur told the New York Times. “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.”
For attorney Stuart Karle, Thiel’s covert campaign to bankrupt the left-leaning gossip blog is reminiscent of when Southern officials tried to silence coverage of the Civil Rights movement.
Thiel’s tactics “resemble nothing so much as the legal maneuvers white racists used to threaten the Northern press with ruin if it continued to cover the violent official response to efforts to desegregate the South in the 1950s and ’60s,” Karle wrote for the Post.
Karle went on to explain his meaning by referencing a 1960 lawsuit brought against the New York Times by five Alabama state officials. The Times had published an ad decrying Southern officials for an “unprecedented wave of terror” that threatened to shut down protests led by black students. Though the ad contained a number of factual inaccuracies, its criticism of Southern officials was nevertheless accurate, Karle wrote.
Alabama officials responded by bringing a libel lawsuit against the Times, and sought $3 million in damages. The idea, Karle claimed, was that Southern officials were trying to make it too costly for newsrooms to cover the Civil Rights movement.
The Supreme Court eventually overturned the Alabama courts, and ruled that “public officials could recover damages for false and defamatory statements involving their official duties only if they could prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that the media knowingly lied or acted in reckless disregard of the truth,” the op-ed explained.
Therefore, he added, the Supreme Court foresaw campaigns like the one Thiel has waged against Gawker, and they put in protections to supposedly guard against it.
A jury awarded Hogan a total of $140 million in March. The first ruling awarded the wrestler $115 million. One week later, the jury awarded him an additional $25.1 million in punitive damages. The release of the video, which was reportedly recorded by the husband of Hogan’s former paramour, resulted in the wrestler splitting with his wife of 25 years, Linda Hogan.
Gawker is on the hook for $15 million, and its founder, Nick Denton, is personally responsible for $10 million of that sum. Former Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio, whose site originally posted the sex tape, owes Hogan $100,000.
A judge dismissed Gawker’s motion last month for a new trial in the Hogan case. The judge also threw out requests for a reduction in the jury’s $140 million ruling.
“The powerful have always done their best to discourage an independent press from scrutinizing their behavior,” Karle wrote. “One may sympathize with Thiel and Hogan when the media either behaves badly or publishes stories that seem unfair.”
“But a concerted legal campaign by a powerful man to force a publisher to spend all its money on legal fees explicitly because that man wants to drive that publisher out of business deserves as much scorn when done by a tech mogul as when done by racist officials who embodied one of the more tragic aspects of our history,” he added.
