In the wake of Hulk Hogan’s death, the defunct site Gawker is in the news again. Depending on who you ask, Hogan’s takedown of Gawker was either an American tragedy or his greatest achievement. Personally, I’m in the latter camp, but let’s hear from the other side first.
The NY Times has two different stories about Hogan vs. Gawker up today, one of which was written by a co-founder of Gawker named Elizabeth Spiers. Here she is lamenting that Gawker was sued out of existence for publishing a two-minute excerpt from a Hulk Hogan sex tape.
The lawsuit, to be clear, was not important because Gawker was important. Gawker was largely an entertainment site that, on its best days, reported presciently about powerful people behaving badly. The site published stories about the alleged sexual misconduct of many celebrities long before the #MeToo movement, and published Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book way back in 2015. It could also be frivolous, crass, and even mean, which often rankled the powerful people it covered. But journalists’ frivolity, vulgarity and snark all happen to be protected by the First Amendment, as long as what they write is truthful. Only there is an exception to that: When someone sues for invasion of privacy, the truth is no longer a defense. And that is what Mr. Hogan and his allies cynically exploited.
Because that sex tape was undeniably Mr. Hogan, he could not sue Gawker for defamation and win. But Gawker had made plenty of powerful people angry in its day, one of whom was the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. (A Gawker site had outed Mr. Thiel as gay in 2007 and later reported that his hedge fund had gone into free fall. Again, truthful.) What Mr. Thiel recognized then was that someone with deep pockets can try to drown an outlet in legal fees and make truth legally irrelevant by suing for invasion of privacy.
Mr. Thiel funded Mr. Hogan’s suit, intending to drag Gawker in and out of court until it was bankrupted either by the cost of fighting the lawsuit or by any damages awarded. After an initial suit on the basis of copyright infringement failed in federal court, Mr. Hogan brought a second suit against the publication in state court. He found a friendly jurisdiction in his hometown — Tampa, Fla. — where he sued Gawker for invasion of privacy. There, Mr. Hogan won his case. The jury awarded him damages of $140 million; Gawker ultimately settled for $31 million. A cocktail of bad luck and an angry billionaire resulted in an industry-defining judgment. Gawker did not have the money left to put up the $50 million bond needed to appeal the decision.
The other article published today tries to make the case that Gawker hadn’t yet become (in 2012 when it posted the Hulk Hogan video) the left-wing site it was when it died at the hands of the lawsuit in 2016. The author’s argument is that initially Gawker was just vicious, not woke.
As Ben Smith recounts in “Traffic,” his recent history of the rise of digital media, Daulerio was a creature of the earlier, meaner Gawker days. As editor of another Gawker property, Deadspin, he published questionably obtained pictures of athletes’ penises, posted a link to peeping Tom footage of the ESPN reporter Erin Andrews changing in a hotel room, and published a video of a visibly drunk female college student having sex in a bar bathroom. According to a 2011 profile in GQ, Daulerio heard directly from a woman he took to be the person in the video, begging him to take it down; he initially refused, but relented the next day, admitting to the magazine that what the video depicted “was possibly rape.”
The Gawker that published the Hogan tape wasn’t yet the website that it would become in the public imagination; digital media hadn’t yet taken the crusading and moralizing form it would later that decade. In 2012, the site — and maybe the whole country — was on the other side of a fulcrum that was hard to see at the time. Just one year later, another Gawker site, Valleywag, would post the news that a completely unknown communications professional, Justine Sacco, had made a racially insensitive joke on Twitter, which led to her firing — and inaugurated a tumultuous new era in American life.
Justine Sacco made a joke on Twitter and then got on a plane. By the time she landed her life had been blown up by woke scolds looking to punish her. She was one of the earliest victims of what became known as cancel culture.
Gawker was a particularly vicious left-wing news site. It was cancel culture incarnate before anyone was using those words to describe what it was doing. That cancel culture may have been a bit unfocused in the early years but it quickly found its home base along with other left-wing purveyors of the same.
So I don’t really buy this idea that Gawker wasn’t woke. It seems to me woke and vicious were always destined to wind up embracing because they share the same mindset which sees cruelty as a virtue. This is altruistic punishment in action. Gawker helped make it fashionable and fun. They trained people to love it before it even had a name.
The best take on Gawker’s demise comes from Jeff Blehar at National Review.
Now is not the time to delve into the immensely damaging legacy of Gawker and the media culture it spawned. Suffice it to say that it was founded on an explicit ethos of wanton cruelty: a bunch of frustrated New York hipsters experiencing cocaine for the first time and spending their hungover waking hours writing left-coded invective against any and every “insider” target available. This soon metastasized into an all-out war against decency — as long as it garnered laughs or clicks from its leftist (and media-heavy) audience.
The tales of Gawker Media’s ethical wretchedness during the 2010s are legendary to my generation of media observers: Deadspin once happily relied on a gay hustler to out a random media executive as homosexual (the hustler had unsuccessfully tried to blackmail the executive; Gawker was presumably his avenue of last resort). Why did they do it? Merely because the man was a Condé Nast executive, and Gawker Media forever cast itself as the implacable enemy of establishment New York publishing.
But everyone was grist for the mill, really: If clicks could be wrung out of spotlighting, shaming, and destroying even complete civilians, then to hell with them. Gawker infamously posted a video of a drunken girl having sex in the bathroom of a college bar. When the girl in the video pleaded with Gawker to remove it, editor A. J. Daulerio emailed her a three-word reply: “blah blah blah.” He later conceded that he didn’t know if it was a rape or not, and didn’t care.
It’s common now to think of the far left (on college campuses, etc.) as eager to personally destroy anyone who disagrees with them. Gawker was surfing that same wave years before leftists made “woke” part of the political lexicon. Cruelty was their brand and people on the left could sense they were kindred spirits. But as Blehar says, for anyone not a part of the cult, seeing Gawker destroyed was a great moment.
People, it was a beautiful thing to see. With one fell swoop, this titanic engine of evil — for that is truly what I believe Gawker Media to have been — was destroyed wholesale, its powers winking out in nearly an instant, its ashes scattered to the four winds.
He compares it to the end of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. Another way to put it is that Hulk Hogan was Luke Skywalker taking out the Death Star with some timely help from Peter Thiel. “Now let’s blow this thing and go home, kid!”
For the leftist media it was a major setback (though obviously not a lasting defeat). A kind of ruthless cruelty they had not-so-secretly admired and hoped to adopt more widely for use against their political enemies got blown away. Since then they’ve had to rein in some of their worst instincts for fear of a similar end. For me, that’s Hulk Hogan’s greatest legacy.
