Harder, also represented multiple other plaintiffs suing Gawker. When the Observer covered the trial, a Gawker employee mused over drinks about the odd coincidence that one of Hogan’s lawyers, Charles J. Dan Abrams floated the possibility on his legal news site LawNewz, wondering whether there was anything to the tip he had received that some Tampa lawyers believed a benefactor had agreed to cover Hogan’s legal fees. Online news site Gawker Media has been sold to media firm Univision for 135m (£103m) in a bankruptcy auction. Hulk Hogan, the Los Angeles-based attorney had just published a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter.
#Gawker sued by insurance trial#
(Those signs showed what seemed to be a curious commitment to a public trial rather than a payday, including Hogan’s refusal to agree to a settlement during the three-year-long lawsuit and his legal team’s decision to drop a claim from the suit that would have been covered by Gawker’s insurance).ĭuring the trial, conspiracy theories began gaining steam. More than two weeks removed from a landmark victory for his client Terry Bollea, a.k.a. “We’d heard the rumor and sort of dismissed the revenge-funder idea as too evil to be true, though in retrospect all along there were some obvious signs,” Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an email to the Observer. Rumors that there was a mystery financer footing Hogan’s legal bills had been floating around Tampa legal circles and the New York media world, but it didn’t go beyond that.
All along, it turned out, the lengthy and costly Hogan case-as well as other lawsuits against Gawker-had been clandestinely funded by Peter Thiel, the Paypal co-founder and entrepreneur worth an estimated $2.7 billion, who made Gawker’s destruction his personal mission. The lawyers for Hogan even narrowed the scope of the lawsuit to make sure that Gawker’s insurance. Was it that it was being fought over a video of a former wrestler having sex with the former wife of his former friend? Was it that the Florida jury didn’t just side with Hogan, but awarded him $25 million more than he was seeking in damages-a total of $140 million? That a company that began as the ultimate insider-y New York media gossip blog might be brought down by a 62-year-old one-time heavyweight champion from Tampa? The surreal nature of the trial itself? Or the fact that the drama’s other leading player was a shock jock who had legally changed his name to Bubba the Love Sponge? The list went on.īut it turned out that all of that was nothing compared to the bombshell revelation in late May that the lawsuit was actually part of a secret plot by a tech billionaire to exact revenge for unflattering stories about Silicon Valley power players that the notoriously snarky media company had published over the years. Peter Thiel proves Silicon Valley only hates lawsuits when it’s the one getting sued.
0 kommentar(er)
