Peter Thiel is a Petty, Vindictive, Dangerous Human (Please Don’t Sue Us)
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According to recent news reports, the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit that threatens to bankrupt Gawker media was anonymously funded by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley billionaire, early investor and board member of Facebook, and Libertarian supporter of Donald Trump. According to reports, Thiel decided to wage proxy legal warfare against Gawker because he was mad at them for publishing a story in 2007 saying that he was gay (Thiel is openly gay, but in 2007 he had not yet formally gone public about his sexual orientation).
This story is amazing on multiple levels:
1. Peter Thiel is RUTHLESS. He stayed angry at Gawker for YEARS and kept biding his time, waiting for them to do something that might make themselves vulnerable to a lawsuit—and then he sprung into action!
2. Peter Thiel is DIABOLICAL. Hulk Hogan’s lawyers deliberately did some legal maneuvering during the trial that would exempt Gawker’s insurance company from having to pay for the settlement—presumably at Thiel’s direction, they were deliberately trying to kill the company by exposing the company’s own assets.
3. Peter Thiel is PETTY. Now that Gawker is facing a $140 million court judgment, Peter Thiel went to Stage 2 of his plan, by going public as the financial backer of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit—thus laying down the gauntlet to any prospective buyers or investors to warn them not to go near Gawker. This is cold-blooded shit! (Side note: how petty do you have to be to set this kind of elaborate evil plan into motion, YEARS later, against a shitty gossip website that most people don’t even pay attention to? Peter Thiel’s a billionaire! His time is INFINITELY valuable! Instead of spending time secretly managing Hulk Hogan’s sex tape lawsuit, he could have just ignored Gawker and stuffed his ears with $100 bills and spent his time doing cannonballs into his private Olympic-sized swimming pool full of champagne! I can’t even fathom this level of pettiness. I almost have to admire that kind of attention to detail, and that kind of long-term lust for revenge. Maybe being petty is what makes people truly great!)
What does this all mean? First of all: Gawker is screwed. Even if they eventually get this $140 million verdict overturned or reduced on appeal, Peter Thiel is not going away. He can keep tormenting Gawker forever, until they go bankrupt. Former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio (who originally approved the Hogan story to be published, and whose disastrous testimony at the trial made him look like the least sympathetic defense witness since Jeffrey Dahmer) got slapped with $100,000 in punitive damages that Daulerio will have to personally pay.
Now, I don’t want to bend over backwards to defend Gawker’s conduct: they were a bunch of sleazy morons for publishing the Hulk Hogan sex tape when he didn’t want them to; they probably were legally wrong to do what they did, and they probably deserved to lose big in court.
But the bigger story here is the possible chilling effect that this precedent could have for media coverage and freedom of the press. What troubles me about this story is not the fact that a clickbait gossip site got sued for posting a sleazy sex tape—it’s the idea that a vindictive billionaire can use a loophole in the court system to secretly wage legal battles by proxy, without his name and influence being known until after the fact. It’s scary that a rich, powerful man can use such sneaky, underhanded tactics to destroy a media organization for petty, personal reasons. As Felix Salmon writes in Fusion:
“If Thiel’s strategy works against Gawker, it could be used by any billionaire against any media organization. Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, the list goes on and on. Up until now, they’ve mostly been content suing news organizations as plaintiffs, over stories which name them. But Thiel has shown them how to go thermonuclear: bankroll other lawsuits, as many as it takes, and bankrupt the news organization that way. Very few companies have the legal wherewithal to withstand such a barrage.”
In a worst-case scenario, if the types of tactics that Thiel used against Gawker are able to stand, no media organization will be safe. Any billionaire could use his unlimited resources to bankrupt any media organization he disapproved of, by funding third-party lawsuits that were totally unrelated to the billionaire’s own life or business.
Aside from the merits of the Hulk Hogan case (and again, Gawker acted like a bunch of stupid scumbags), what Thiel is doing is an absolute perversion of the justice system. But I also have no idea how to stop it. Sure, rich people using the courts to get what they want is nothing new; but this idea of billionaires secretly funding lawsuits and acting like puppet masters behind the scenes just feels even more wrong. If someone is suing you, you deserve to know who your adversary really is. If you’re being sued, you should have a right to know who is funding the lawsuit against you; it seems like that’s part of the legal principle of having the right to face your accuser in court. Maybe plaintiffs should be required to disclose the sources of funding for their legal fees? If political campaigns are required to disclose the names of people who donate to fund the campaign, shouldn’t a lawsuit (a matter of public record) be held to the same standard?