Few factors deter vengeance by litigation one is that litigation is impossibly expensive, even for plaintiffs. Eventual vindication rarely comes with reimbursement of fees and costs, let alone compensation for the disruption and stress. Defending a civil suit, whatever its merits, is often a years-long pitched battle. Though Thiel crushed Gawker through victory, he might well have crushed it in defeat.
The problem is that Thiel found a way to weaponize the brokenness of our legal system. What Thiel did wasn’t illegal he has free-speech rights too. We don’t need the 1st Amendment to defend popular speech, we need it to protect unpopular speech our civic obligations are at their peak precisely when loathsome people are on the line.ĭevotion to the 1st Amendment should also provoke grave concerns about Thiel’s open-checkbook funding of Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. In short, we shouldn’t just assume that crushing bad people is just or defensible.
#Gawker apple trial
The right for high school students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the right to burn a flag, the right for Hustler magazine to satirize Jerry Falwell, the right for the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers without prior restraint, the requirement that public officials prove that journalists engaged in actual malice before winning a defamation case – all of these important rights arose from Supreme Court decisions correcting the mistakes of trial courts and juries. Nor should we take for granted that the judge and jury decided the case wisely, because most of our cherished free-speech rights have been recognized by appellate courts after judges and juries erred. We don’t need the 1st Amendment to defend popular speech, we need it to protect unpopular speech. Rather, courts must carefully determine whether particular speech falls into well-defined exceptions to the 1st Amendment, such as obscenity or fraud. The 1st Amendment does not allow courts to craft new ad hoc exceptions to free-speech principles when speech is sufficiently upsetting. Nevertheless, when a jury verdict bankrupts a media company for what it has published, we ought to examine meticulously whether the company received due process, whether the court applied the correct 1st Amendment principles, whether the verdict was based on mere antipathy rather than law and fact, and whether the damages are proportionate to the alleged wrongdoing. So, yes, Gawker got what was coming in a karmic sense. “Blah, blah, blah,” a Gawker editor wrote in passing along a complaint from a young woman who was the subject of a stolen video, eagerly published for clicks, that may have depicted her rape. And the trial, far from rehabilitating Gawker’s reputation for professionalism or decency, soiled it further by dredging up unseemly episodes from the site’s past. Observers were, then, rather skeptical that Gawker had principled journalistic reasons to publish Hulk Hogan’s sex tape. Gawker offers nihilistic hypocrisy as clickbait. A reliable critic of objectifying women out of one side of its mouth, Gawker publishes hacked and leaked nudes out of the other. Senate, including critique of her pubic hair, because Gawker didn’t like her politics. Gawker paid a young man to describe a sexual encounter with a candidate for U.S. Gawker also champions feminist values, particularly through its site Jezebel, even as it humiliates women for traffic. Recently, Gawker transmuted blackmail into clicks when it participated in a male escort’s extortion of a married executive from a rival media empire. At the same time, its writers smugly and self-righteously out gay men. Gawker Media attacks anti-gay politicians and celebrates advances in gay rights. It was also a reaction to Gawker’s routine degradation of its targets, and to how sharply that behavior contrasts with Gawker’s progressive pieties. Spite arose from partisan hostility to Gawker’s reliably left-of-center sensibilities. From a legal and constitutional perspective, even Gawker haters should be troubled by its fate. But schadenfreude isn’t a 1st Amendment value. It’s tempting to side with the gloaters I’m as disgusted by Gawker as the next guy, and I’m not above feeling a frisson of glee when bad people face consequences for their actions.
“Goodbye and good riddance to Gawker,” the New York Post sneered. “What a beautiful day,” tweeted Hulk Hogan, whose $140-million invasion-of-privacy verdict - underwritten by hostile Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel - doomed Nick Denton’s snarky online empire. Last week’s Gawker Media bankruptcy inspired online triumph.
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