In 2016, Thiel was revealed to have funded wrestler Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media, along with two other suits. The legal woes led to Gawker filing for bankruptcy and the sale of six of the company’s websites to Univision Communications for $135 million in 2016.Ĭoincidentally, earlier this week Univision announced that it is exploring the sale of the former Gawker sites, as well as its stake in The Onion, with the Hispanic media company saying it will focus on its core business. Bollea said they had no intention of showing the tape to the jury during the has been dormant since August 2016, after it was sued into bankruptcy via three lawsuits funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who was unhappy about a Gawker story that reported that he was gay. The video remained on the site for about six months, until a court ordered its removal. “We continued to believe in its newsworthiness.” Bollea, asking Gawker to take down the video shortly after it had been posted, “wasn’t persuasive,” Mr. “We can’t always determine the circumstances in which a film was made,” he said.Ī letter from a lawyer for Mr. Denton did not impede the video’s publication, although he advised his editor “not to put up the whole tape.” A video editor cut it to 1 minute 41 seconds, from roughly 30 minutes.Īsked whether he or his staff had looked into the tape’s provenance, Mr. Denton said, noting that he preferred stories that had “some kind of meaning.” Daulerio’s feelings, he had not been “very excited” by news that Gawker had received a video showing Hulk Hogan having sex with a woman on a four-poster bed. Under questioning in the deposition, recorded in October 2013, Mr. Both defendants, however, are on their own legal team’s list of witnesses, to be called to the stand when it is the defense’s turn to present evidence at the trial. The plaintiffs’ use of taped depositions at this early stage of the trial seemed intended to stave off cross-examinations by the defense, which might reduce the impact of their words on the videos. Denton, was also shown to the jury, later in the day, even though the two men were sitting behind their lawyers in the courtroom. “So it’s fair to say that whether he suffered emotional distress or not, that played no part in your decision whether or what to publish,” he said. Mirell suggested.Ī moment later, after an objection from a lawyer for Gawker, Mr. Bollea to ask him whether he was in fact the man in the grainy video, and how he felt about Gawker’s intention of publishing it. Mirell, the defendant said that neither he nor anyone else at Gawker had made any attempt to contact Mr. “I thought it was newsworthy, and it was something that was worth publishing.” He explained that he had “enjoyed watching the video” and was eager to attach his commentary to it on the site. “I was very enthusiastic about writing about it,” Mr. Daulerio said, dictated the site’s handling of the video of Hulk Hogan, which he noted had been provided anonymously to him in the mail and for which no money had changed hands. Daulerio conceded that no such consideration guided Gawker’s publication of lewd images of the former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre or of photographs of a topless Duchess of Cambridge. In such a culture, he went on, it was “pretty standard operating procedure” to seize upon and publish photographs and videos of celebrities in compromising or intimate situations, regardless of whether the celebrity might object or be embarrassed. Daulerio and other current and former members of Gawker’s staff has raised a curtain on the culture of the website and others like it that traffic in salacious fare in an effort to gain readers.Īsked whether sex sells, Mr.
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