Gawker has, on occasion, run pieces which teeter on the brink of bad taste. Sometimes the site has even run pieces which fell from that ledge. But those lapses don’t justify bringing the whole structure down in flames.

The infamous article outing a Condé Nast executive as gay last year was one of those, and Gawker was rightly excoriated for it. The 2007 story outing venture capitalist Peter Thiel was another. Stories in which people’s private sexual preferences, without genuine public interest at stake, are splashed without their consent on the front pages of newspapers or news sites have no place in a modern, enlightened press.

And yet Thiel’s revenge – he has bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s ongoing lawsuit against Gawker Media, which has resulted in a $140m decision against the company – has been utterly disproportionate: overwhelming, sinister, and nine years in the making. Gawker filed for bankruptcy on Friday to protect its assets.

The case has already been thrown out by a federal court; the only reason we are here is because Hogan’s team cherry-picked a Florida state courthouse where a jury was much more likely to be hostile to Gawker’s case. It remains reasonably likely to be thrown out on appeal. But Hogan’s is not the only lawsuit against Gawker that Thiel has been secretly backing.

He has a genuine grievance. But the fact that an unaccountable billionaire has been able to weaponize his wealth, in absolute secrecy, to game the American legal system using puppet claimants to turn thumbscrews on reporters and media companies – do so repeatedly, backing suit after suit: that is something which should terrify us all. Not just fans of Gawker. Not just journalists. All of us.

It is the media’s job to hold the powerful to account. Gawker and its other sites – Gizmodo, Jezebel and so on – are an important part of that landscape. Just last month, it was Gizmodo who spoke to newsfeed curators at Facebook – a company for which Thiel was the first outside investor – and revealed the human hands behind the supposedly algorithmic trending topics feed.



This year Jezebel also revealed a secretive group which recruits vulnerable women operating in the heart of New York City. In 2012, Adrian Chen – then at Gawker, now at the New Yorker – unmasked Michael Brutsch, AKA Violentacrez, the troll behind several controversial subreddits, including one where users post secretly snapped photos of underage girls. The page was shut down.

The company seems to have already found a buyer in the form of Ziff Davis, the media company which owns PC Magazine, and reportedly has no plans to cease publishing at this point, so this is hopefully not the end of the line.

We live in an era where the media, already beleaguered by unstable finances, is under unprecedented attack. At Donald Trump rallies, reporters are penned in a designated area as Trump encourages his audience to boo and hurl abuse at us. The vitriol is the same on the opposite side of the political spectrum; Bernie Sanders also strikes out at the “mainstream media” in his speeches.



Trump and Sanders’ schtick is a symptom of a deeper malaise. Public trust in the media has been in constant decline for two decades, with a majority of Americans holding little or no trust in mass media since 2007.

Journalism must work to earn back that trust; but in the meantime, Thiel’s revenge, executed with chilling precision like a comic-book villain in an ominous lair, should distress anyone with any interest in free speech. Because while it is Gawker today, it could be the New York Times, or the Guardian, or Breitbart, or the Daily Mail – or any of us – tomorrow. If the oligarchs of Silicon Valley feel empowered to sink outlets that they disagree with, our robot overlords will be here sooner than we think.