Epigraph: A freshening stream of libel actions, which often seem as much designed to punish writers and publications as to recover damages for real injuries, may threaten the public and constitutional interest in free, and frequently rough, discussion.
—Judge Robert Bork, concurring opinion in Ollman v. Evans, 1984
A. J. Daulerio was in Montana when the package—a thin envelope without a return address, containing nothing more than a DVD—arrived at his New York office. It was September 2012, and Daulerio was the top editor at Gawker, the swashbuckling network of websites whose modus operandi was to offend the sensibilities of the rich, famous, powerful, and power-hungry. For weeks, rumors had been circulating online about an unauthorized sex tape featuring the wrestler Hulk Hogan. A few gossip sites had run items on it, even teased readers with stills from the video. Now someone had sent Gawker thirty minutes of grainy black-and-white footage of Hogan and an unidentified woman.
Daulerio was in Missoula to catch a Pearl Jam show. He was an obsessive follower of the band, which he’d seen perform all over the country. This gig promised to be unusual: it was Pearl Jam’s only appearance that year outside of a music festival, and the concert was doubling as a fundraiser1 for Montana’s first-term Democratic senator, Jon Tester, who was locked in a tight reelection battle. Eddie Vedder and company
were playing at a smallish venue on the University of Montana campus. Tickets had sold out in fifteen minutes. By some standards, Daulerio was one of the most notorious journalists of the internet age. Gawker had a reputation for breaking news and shattering norms and being downright mean. So did Daulerio. He’d started out as a traditional reporter, working his way up from a local newspaper in his native Pennsylvania to a couple of niche business publications in New York. He got his big break at Deadspin, Gawker’s sports blog, where he produced a mix of juicy scoops—exposing the rickety finances4 of pro baseball and basketball teams and revealing Brett Favre’s alleged sexual harassment, for example—and a constant patter of dick pics and clickbait. During Daulerio’s tenure as Deadspin’s top editor, its traffic nearly quadrupled. GQ credited him with transforming it into “the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web.” In 2011 he was promoted to be the editor of Gawker itself. Daulerio was a mess. He’d been abusing substances—alcohol, coke, Adderall, acid, Xanax, you name it—for years. “I didn’t treat anything seriously,” he later said. Not his relationships, not his job, nothing. “I was basically just like one of those guys that even when I was making a lot of money, I was still broke all the time.” Now, at what would become a fateful moment for Gawker and the entire media industry, he was 2,300 miles away, screaming at Eddie Vedder, who was onstage in a short-sleeved flannel shirt and skinny jeans, battling a cold and swigging from a
champagne bottle. “It’s not every day you get to do a benefit for a candidate you believe in,” Vedder rasped to the cheering crowd. The concert lasted two and a half delirious hours. Pearl Jam rocked a twenty-nine-song set, including many of its staples and a smattering of politically themed covers. An hour in, Vedder performed a melodic rendition of “Know Your Rights” by the Clash. “These are your rights,” he sang,
tilting the microphone stand toward the crowd. “You have the right to free speech—provided, of course, you’re not actually dumb enough to try it.” Daulerio, it turned out, was definitely dumb enough to try it. He, his Gawker colleagues, and many others were about to pay an awful price. Eighteen months earlier, an Oxford law student named Aron D’Souza had gone out to dinner in Berlin with the hard-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The pair had known each other since 2009, when D’Souza had given Thiel a tour of Oxford. D’Souza was one of those young men with a knack for ingratiating themselves with the powerful. “What’s the biggest problem you face?” he had asked Thiel as they strolled the ancient campus. “There’s this terrible outlet writing all this terrible stuff about me,” Thiel had replied. D’Souza always researched people he was about to meet for the first time, and so he had known what Thiel was referring to: Gawker. A couple of years earlier, the website had reported that he was gay. That would have been bad enough—Thiel had come out to a lot of people, though not publicly—but Gawker was pioneering a uniquely skeptical form of writing about tech titans like Thiel, who had grown accustomed to a generally docile press marveling at their latest inventions. That wasn’t Gawker’s style. The website seemed hell-bent on piercing his self-created image as a visionary. Gawker had documented his hedge fund’s financial struggles and tax avoidance and his fringe political and philosophical theories. (Among many other things, Thiel had seemed to complain about women getting the right to vote, and he had written that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”) Thiel thought that Gawker’s coverage was causing investors to pull money out of his hedge fund and discouraging others from putting money in. Just as alarming, Gawker’s mode of reporting seemed to be spreading. As the tech industry gained economic and cultural clout, other news outlets—from rival upstarts to established newspapers—were beginning to cover Silicon Valley more aggressively, with an eye toward holding its companies and leaders to account, much as reporters might write about Wall Street or the White House. (Part of this might have been a reaction to Gawker’s years of needling rival tech reporters as “toothless.”) The result, it was becoming clear, would soon be a new era of intense scrutiny for the men atop what was fast becoming the world’s most powerful industry. Someone needed to nip this in the bud. Thiel had taken to warning that Gawker’s style menaced not just him but all of Silicon Valley. “I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters,” he growled in 2009. At one point, he asked staffers to hire private investigators to dig into the personal life and finances of Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton. (The efforts apparently came up empty.) After their campus tour, Thiel and D’Souza had kept in touch, and they both happened to be in Berlin in April 2011. They met for dinner at Tim Raue, a Michelin-starred restaurant around the corner from Checkpoint Charlie. Over a seven-course tasting menu and some very expensive Riesling, Thiel resumed his grumbling about Gawker. “Why don’t you just sue them?” D’Souza asked. Thiel said that would just attract more attention—the last thing he wanted. The idea, D’Souza told me, hit him out of the blue: What if Thiel recruited someone else to sue Gawker? Thiel could bankroll their litigation through an intermediary, while remaining in the shadows. “Basically run a proxy war,” he suggested. D’Souza didn’t realize it—he was no expert in American history or constitutional law—but he was in essence proposing a clandestine version of the strategy that L. B. Sullivan and his Alabama colleagues had perfected back in 1960: trying to bankrupt a bothersome media company through waves of costly litigation. Thiel lit up. He spent the rest of the dinner excitedly talking about the possibilities. It was nearing midnight, and the restaurant was about to close. The pair decamped to a nearby hotel bar. Thiel asked D’Souza what it would cost to crush Gawker. D’Souza was twenty-five years old and had no idea. “Ten million,” he guessed. That was nothing for Thiel. “Aron, come work with me,” Thiel said as they parted ways around 2 a.m. “Let’s do this.” Then and there, D’Souza agreed. Two months later, after collecting his diploma from Oxford, he flew to his native Australia, dropped off his stuff, hopped a flight to New Zealand, sat down with Thiel, and put their plot in motion. It was codenamed MBTO, an acronym for Manhattan-based terrorist organization, which was how they viewed Gawker. The two men briefly discussed bribing employees to sabotage Gawker, bugging its offices to collect dirt, or even hacking the company’s computers. They eventually decided that a legal approach would be better. The first step was to hire a lawyer. D’Souza interviewed a bunch of Brits, but they lacked the entrepreneurial spirit and creativity that the mission would require. Then someone mentioned a Hollywood lawyer named Charles Harder. D’Souza had never heard of Harder, which was a selling point. “You don’t want a superstar,” D’Souza explained to me, sitting in his basement office in London on a sunny autumn afternoon. “You want someone who wants to make his name.” Harder, who was in his early forties, was a Los Angeles native and registered Democrat. He’d spent his early years as a lawyer at the firm of Lavely & Singer. It was dominated by the notorious Hollywood hatchet man Marty Singer, who often was the first stop for celebrities engulfed in scandal. Harder considered Singer to be “a mentor of sorts,” but he hadn’t enjoyed the job. “It wasn’t much fun, the stress was constant, the hours were too long, and workload too heavy,” Harder told me via email. In 2008 he left to join a larger, cushier LA firm, Wolf Rifkin Shapiro. Harder’s specialty was making sure brands didn’t use his clients’ names or images without authorization. (He represented Clint Eastwood in a lawsuit against a furniture store that was selling “Eastwood” chairs, and he sued a company for using Sandra Bullock’s image to advertise diamond-encrusted watches.) Lean and perma-tanned, with sandy hair and a Brooks Brothers–style wardrobe, Harder looked the part of LA lawyer. He wasn’t particularly well-known—one writer described him as “another cog in the Hollywood machine”—but he was respected. At one point, Oxford University Press had asked him to help write and edit a book on entertainment law. One day in early 2012, D’Souza called Harder to introduce himself. He said he was representing some very rich individuals who hated Gawker. Would Harder be interested in exploring legal avenues for destroying the site? Singer’s law firm had represented people who’d been attacked by Gawker, and Harder had formed what he described as “a strong negative impression” of the outlet. On the phone, he immediately began brainstorming. D’Souza loved it. This guy was brimming with creativity, ambition, and an instinct to go “straight for the jugular.” Plus, Thiel liked the idea of having an LA lawyer, as opposed to someone in New York or Silicon Valley, in the driver’s seat. It would add an extra layer of anonymity. If anyone caught on to what D’Souza was doing with this lawyer, they’d probably suspect the operation was being run to benefit someone like Rupert Murdoch. Harder was hired. Now it was his job to help figure out how to take down Gawker.* He and his team spent months poring over press clippings and legal filings, trying to identify potential points of weakness. Could they pursue a fraud or patent case? An action brought by the shareholders of Gawker’s holding companies? An attempt to force out Nick Denton? Ultimately the conclusion was that they would need to win a crippling verdict. And that meant finding a plaintiff—someone who had been severely harmed by a Gawker website—to serve as a vehicle for retribution. For as long as he’d been a journalist, Daulerio had been hooked on scoops. He loved the competitive chase for news, the adrenaline rush followed by the dopamine hit of being first to reveal something to the world. (“He needs the next story like an addict needs their next fix,” Denton said in 2011.) The Hulk Hogan sex tape wasn’t exactly Watergate, but it struck Daulerio and his colleagues as fair game. For years Hogan had been boasting about his sexual exploits. Plus, Gawker operated under the basic principle that if the site received information, it should be published. Gawker’s lawyers gave the green light to post the video, so long as they kept it short. Daulerio asked a video editor to cut it into a “highlight reel,” and, to accompany the 101-second film, he wrote an essay about the public’s obsession with celebrity sex. “I was very enthusiastic about writing about it,” Daulerio later said. “I thought it was newsworthy.” On October 4, 2012, a week after the DVD had been delivered to Gawker’s offices, the website posted Daulerio’s essay and the video, about nine seconds of which displayed a naked Hulk Hogan having sex with what turned out to be his best friend’s wife. “Even for a Minute, Watching Hulk Hogan Have Sex in a Canopy Bed Is Not Safe for Work but Watch It Anyway,” yelled the headline. The post became “a blockbuster,” garnering about seven million page views. Hogan’s longtime lawyer, David Houston, had been working for weeks to prevent the video from being published. He’d persuaded other websites not to post it. Now Gawker had gone and done it. He sent the site a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that the video be taken down. A lawyer for Gawker responded that it was newsworthy and would remain online. By then, Harder knew all about the sex tape. He and D’Souza had a crew of about twenty employees56 reading every single item that Gawker had ever published, scouring them for potential causes of action. As soon as Harder saw Daulerio’s post, he recognized the opportunity. The publication of the explicit video struck him as a flagrant violation of Hogan’s privacy. And Daulerio’s piece was quickly racking up page views, which would make it easier to argue that it had damaged Hogan’s reputation. He pinged D’Souza. It was the middle of the night in Australia, but D’Souza had set up his phone to alert him whenever Harder or Thiel messaged him. Bingo, Harder wrote. This is it. D’Souza agreed. Harder phoned Houston, told him he represented someone with an interest in pursuing Gawker, and volunteered to help on a lawsuit. Houston accepted the offer. A week later, Harder, Houston, and Hogan stood on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse in Tampa, facing a cluster of reporters and camera crews. They had just filed a lawsuit seeking $100 million against Gawker for invading Hogan’s privacy. “The actions of the defendants cannot be tolerated by a civil society,” Harder declared. Hogan posed behind him in a black T-shirt, bandana, and sunglasses, a tough-guy pose etched on his mustachioed face. The following three-plus years would be war. Harder and his team viewed the lawsuit, which ended up being moved to state court in Florida, as a vessel not only to compensate Hogan but also for a broader blitz against Gawker. They deposed its employees. They reviewed its internal documents, which they obtained through the discovery process. They contacted the subjects of nasty articles and volunteered to help them sue.60 When Harder learned that Gawker had unpaid interns, he helped organize61 a lawsuit seeking back pay and damages. Thiel’s team would secretly sponsor about a half dozen lawsuits against Gawker, D’Souza told me. Daulerio, Denton, and Gawker’s lawyers had an inkling as to what Harder was doing. When they accused him in court filings, Harder at times seemed to dissemble. Asked whether he was using discovery to amass materials for other potential suits against Gawker, Harder replied that the allegation was “unsupported by any evidence.” (This is what journalists call a “nondenial denial.”) He also claimed that Gawker’s financial resources were “exponentially greater” than Hogan’s, which might have been accurate but didn’t account for the billionaire lurking in Hogan’s corner.* After years of toiling in the backwaters of Hollywood, Harder sensed that this case—not just the Hogan suit but the overall plot against Gawker—was his moment to make a name for himself. Part of it was the money. Harder was making at least $500 an hour, and the hours were extensive. Yet he didn’t feel like he was being compensated sufficiently by his current employer, Wolf Rifkin Shapiro, where, he told me, he was often “one of the biggest rainmakers.” It wasn’t long after D’Souza initially contacted him that Harder told him that he was toying with venturing out on his own, just checking that D’Souza and his clients would stick with him. (They would.) Harder sounded out a colleague, Jeffrey Abrams, and the pair soon got serious about opening their own little law firm. Like Harder, Abrams specialized in so-called right-of-publicity litigation, going after companies and individuals that used celebrities’ names or likenesses for commercial purposes without authorization. Abrams knew another lawyer, Doug Mirell, who had spent the past thirty-plus years at the giant law firm Loeb & Loeb. The two ran in the same circles: Mirell had recently been representing the estate of Marilyn Monroe, while Abrams had been working on behalf of Marlon Brando’s. Their kids attended the same LA private schools. So Abrams pitched Mirell on creating a boutique law firm focused on representing A-list celebrities in publicity cases. The three men met for breakfast at a diner in LA. Mirell didn’t know much about Harder, but he seemed bright and ambitious. The catch was that if they started their own firm, Harder would be taking the Gawker litigation along with him. This was suboptimal for Mirell. He wanted no part in attacking the media. He’d initially been heading for a career in journalism, having been editor in chief of his college newspaper and written for the Hollywood Reporter. Even after becoming a lawyer, his allegiances were clear. At Loeb & Loeb, he had defended news organizations against aggressive plaintiffs. On the other hand, Gawker’s conduct toward Hulk Hogan struck Mirell as “rather outrageous,” he told me. And the Gawker case would be the exception; Mirell’s understanding was that most of the firm’s work would be focused on publicity rights. He was in. The law firm of Harder Mirell & Abrams opened its doors in early 2013. Pretty quickly, it became clear that Mirell and Abrams’s conception of their plan had been imprecise at best. Harder imported from his old firm a couple of high-profile right-of-publicity cases, but he seemed mostly focused on suing Gawker. “He was...
~~~
I chose the above excerpt on purpose to spotlight my own opinions... We have lost control of our legal system. America has become a litigious country where anybody and everybody decides to "sue" at the drop of a hat, just because... Just because they have a real issue... OR, just because they can... Take for instance a recent firing of a top nightly host:
If indeed America has gone too far in controlling cases for "justice" for those actually affected, say, by sexual abuse, job harrassment, or, discrimination based upon race, religion and all other issues that have a basis for seeking action based upon our Constitution, what has finally evolved is much worse.
Let me give you a simple example affecting my life daily. I have been a member of AOL for over 50 years. I was on when even movies were talking about using AOL... At that time, they had a chat activity, it might have been the first, it was that popular... I talked to people in Alaska, Germany, as well as all over the United States... I even met new "friends" online via AOL... But, for whatever reasons, probably because other tech giants had seen the potential and spent the big bucks to create new platforms, such as Facebook, ot Twitter, AOL has dwindled down to just email.
So, I've been on their email now even continuing when I moved about 20 years ago and started out with dialup service here where I live now... Their program was quite good and I saw no need to change it...
However, the company was apparently bought... There was no announcement, except that if you wanted to rid yourself of too many ads, you could pay to do so... Now I had been used to ads so I didn't bother paying for something that I had already supported for over 50 years...like most social sites (as they had been created)...
Now, ad activity has increased 150% or more... The site I use for my personal email versus for my review activities, now receives no more than 10 pieces of actual email for me... Hundreds come in offering free gifts and then if you open, it just says you have a "chance" to try for some gift... Well, you probably know by now, that I refuse to be EXTORTED, for that is what is now being done, simply because their services were not profitable anymore... Well, since I've been a user for well over 50 years, I do not feel I should be penalized just because...for whatever reason AOL could not keep at the top of the game...
You can decide about what you'd do for this one issue upon which I've taken my stand to fight against being threatened, penalized, and purposely being sent even the same mail in any given week...we all know that it is a scam to make money...
Think about it, if I had been the new owner, I would have written a letter to all users about the site changing hands...explaining what their plans were for the future and allowing us to consider the option(s) for what they would be doing... and then thank us for being faithful members!!! Instead, money, money, money grabs began...no matter who or how long you'd been a member of the once-larger site! The action taken was extortiion; the proper management of a site would have been what I would have done, don't you think...
Now, let's look at the extreme extortion that is now taking place all over the world by our political members...
- Anybody who "offends" the president gets immediate retribution through demanding compensation, such as to include eliminating comedians, journalists, lawyers, judges, citizens... anybody who refuses to do what Trump says to do.
- Any program that uses money as approved in the past or, specifically by democrats, is pulled back. USAID, Education, child food programs, refusal to deal with gun control because NRA pays for their security... need I go on?
- The latest is a doozy and may result in America being blown up some day... Remember my background is in facilities management...
- And let's not forget that millions of those covered by Medicaid has been approved for elimination by the recent budget approved by republicans at the demand of the president... while he lies he didn't participate for most of those changes initiated by DOGE
- Let's not forget about the DEI actions taken which resulted in loss of government positions for anybody that is not white men (especially the ranking female leaders in the Pentagon!)
Yes, I could continue to provide examples of "wanting gold toilets" but, hopefully, you all will make the effort to begin to do your own research, if needed...
But let's realize that this book is specifically aimed with the issue of Murdering Truth. It is an exceptionally well written and fully documented series of issues that reveal just how Truth is being lost in our culture. It begins before 2015 when lies began to be counted by news agencies... and continues on to the present with the most "treacherous" liar, because of his position, who has made lying almost the language of America for purposes of business and politics... Do any of you remember the days when companies promised that "the customer was always right..." without forcing that we bow at the feet of the manager or owner to return a purchase? or question the item's quality if ordered online?
Folks when people's lives are being devastated purposefully because they "thought" the president was telling the Truth, only to discover on day 1 of this final term of office that what was going to happen would actually be forced upon the entire world--tariffs, trade deals, cancelling of trade deals, attacks on countries without authorization, removing support for Ukraine and other programs, while delaying actual activities that would lead to the end of that war, back and forth opinions on Gaza rather than taking a firm stand and acting... while children starve!
Surely you recognize that Truth is being Murdered every time republicans open their mouths... After all, who closes the House of Representatives and goes home so they don'e have to vote on releasing documents that were promised during the campaign!? The Epstein files, while are important for understanding how our young girls were abused by rich men, they do not compare to the day-to-day losses of jobs, financial support, threats to universities, that are occurring minute-by-minute to ensure an authoritarian leader evolves for America... and it's all getting implemented through criminal actions!
GABixlerReviews
Remember!!!
The God of Truth is Watching...
Murdering the Truth...
Note: Is there Separation of church and state or not?
ALL People are covered by the Constitution!
Note: Please read the previous article if you have not done so...
It is important that we listen to concerns from all Americans at this time!
God wants us to Love ALL OUR Neighbors!
Consider what ICE is doing stealing people off streets!
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