8/19/2023 0 Comments Peter thiel gawkerFor instance: Hogan’s lawyer apparently insisted on a provision that Gawker Media’s insurance company not be allowed to pay the award, which strongly suggests that the motive behind the suit was to put Denton out of business rather than receive just compensation for the site’s transgressions. Ingram and other defenders of Gawker point to some troubling aspects of Thiel’s involvement that do, in fact, have some important First Amendment implications. ![]() Now you have revealed yourself, let us have an open and public debate.” We each have criticisms of the other’s methods and objectives. We each claim to respect independent journalism, and liberty. Nick Denton himself, in an open letter to Thiel oozing with self-justifying obnoxiousness, wrote, “The best regulation for speech, in a free society, is more speech. And that has disturbing implications for freedom of the press.” Technology pundit Mathew Ingram of Fortune added that the Hogan case has now “become more about an attempt to bankrupt a publication that a billionaire investor dislikes for personal reasons. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan compared Thiel’s actions to the Edward Snowden affair and to Senator John Thune’s thuggish (my word, not hers) demand that Facebook account for perceived liberal bias in its Trending Topics feature. Yet numerous free-speech advocates have expressed horror at the Thiel revelation. Moreover, it’s perfectly legal to finance someone else’s lawsuit. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.”Īs I’ve argued, Hogan’s case against Gawker was well within the bounds of existing privacy law. I think much more highly of journalists than that. The next day Thiel came clean in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, saying, “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations. Thiel, Mac wrote, had been harboring a grudge against Gawker Media and its publisher, Nick Denton, since 2007, when Denton’s Valleywag site outed Thiel as gay. There matters stood until May 24, when Ryan Mac of Forbes revealed that Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and “an eccentric figure in Silicon Valley who has advocated for teenagers to skip college and openly supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump,” was the money behind the Hogan suit. I don’t think it goes any further than that and I do not see a First Amendment basis for claiming that there is a right to do this.” As First Amendment expert Erwin Chemerinsky told the New York Times when the verdict was handed down, “I think this case establishes a very limited proposition: It is an invasion of privacy to make publicly available a tape of a person having sex without that person’s consent. That strikes me as the sort of issue that a jury could legitimately decide either way. Hogan’s status as a public figure makes (b) a little iffy, and Gawker tried to argue that Hogan’s boasts about his sexual prowess made the sex tape newsworthy. One who gives publicity to a matter concerning the private life of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of privacy, if the matter publicized is of a kind that (a) would be highly offensive to a reasonable person and (b) is not of legitimate concern to the public. The principle is explained succinctly in this warning to journalists published by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: It can be traced back to an article that future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner, Samuel Warren, wrote for the Harvard Law Review in 1890. If you care to immerse yourself in the details of the case, you will find all kinds of contradictory statements as to whether Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) and his paramour, Heather Clem (wife of Bubba the Love Sponge Clem and yes, that’s his real name), knew or didn’t know they were being recorded and did or didn’t expect that the video would somehow become public.īut the law involving invasion of privacy is reasonably clear. Such third-party financing is legal, and it proved to be a sound investment: in March, a Florida jury found that Gawker had invaded Hogan’s privacy by publishing a video of him and a friend’s wife without permission and awarded him $140 million. Last week we learned that Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, had provided about $10 million to help fund Hogan’s case. But the way his case is being paid for might. ![]() Does Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy suit against the news-and-gossip site Gawker threaten the First Amendment? No.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |