Gawker Settles With Hulk Hogan, And The First Amendment Is Worse For It

What this means is that the freedom of the press means whatever Peter Thiel decides it means.

(Photo by John Pendygraft-Pool/Getty Images)

Nick Denton (by John Pendygraft-Pool/Getty Images)

Now-defunct Gawker Media has reached a proposed settlement with Peter Thiel’s sock-puppet, Hulk Hogan. Reports suggest Hogan will get $31 million dollars. To put that in context, a jury awarded Hogan $140 million for Gawker’s purported invasion of privacy.

And so we’ll never get to hear the appeal. I still believe that the jury’s verdict would have been knocked down on appeal. At the very least, damages would have been severely reduced. But we’ll never know. As Nick Denton explained on Medium, he couldn’t risk continuing to fight:

Yes, we were confident the appeals court would reduce or eliminate the runaway Florida judgment against Gawker, the writer of the Hogan story and myself personally. And we expected to prevail in those other two lawsuits by clients of Charles Harder, the lawyer backed by Peter Thiel.

But all-out legal war with Thiel would have cost too much, and hurt too many people, and there was no end in sight. The Valley billionaire, famously relentless, had committed publicly to support Hulk Hogan beyond the appeal and “until his final victory.” Gawker’s nemesis was not going away.

For Thiel, an investor in Facebook and Palantir, the cost of this exercise is less than 1% of his net worth and a little additional notoriety. The other protagonists — including Hulk Hogan and A.J. Daulerio, the author of the Gawker story about him — had much more at stake. That motivated a settlement that allows us all to move on, and focus on activities more productive than endless litigation. Life is short, for most of us.

What this means is that the freedom of the press means whatever Peter Thiel decides it means. In a very relevant sense, when I write a story I now have to think (a) is it true and (b) will it off piss Peter Thiel. I’m not even sure I’m allowed to write this. I’m probably better off falsely accusing Donald Trump of secretly meeting with General Zod (clear parody) than saying something true about Thiel that he doesn’t want me to say.

The law, effectively, no longer matters. All that matters is if you can swamp the media publication you don’t like in litigation, and maybe convince a jury of yokels that you are right. This gives litigation finance a bad name. Nick Denton is rich, and he literally couldn’t even survive long enough to make it to appellate review. Unbelievable.

I know who I sound like, and I don’t care:

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“You f***ing people… you have no idea how to defend the First Amendment. All you did was weaken a country today, Hogan. That’s all you did.”

Gawker settles with ex-pro wrestler Hulk Hogan for $31mln [Reuters]
A hard peace [Medium]

Earlier: Seeking The Litigators’ Perspective On Litigation Finance


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Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. But you can call me Lt. Weinberg.