Gawker has been completely destroyed by their own actions. Terry Bollea, AKA Hulk Hogan, was publicly humiliated by Gawker when the media company essentially published a stolen sex tape and refused to take it down even after a court order was issued against the company. Judges hate it when you ignore court orders. Judges also hate it when you laugh at the idea of taking down court orders, too. Gawker was hit with a $140 million dollar judgement by the Florida courts, making Hulk Hogan a very rich man. Now he’ll be less rich, but still pretty well off. Gawker has settled with Hulk Hogan for $31 million dollars.
Gawker, as a company, no longer exists, thanks to Hogan’s lawsuit, which was funded by tech billionaire and PayPal investor Peter Thiel. Most of Gawker’s properties that weren’t directly implicated in the lawsuit were sold to TV network Univision, which has turned the blogs into something called Gizmodo Media Group. They also paid $131 million for the collective, including Gawker, which they shut down almost immediately. So, don’t weep for Nick Denton, Gawker founder and original owner.
“Yes, we were confident the appeals court would reduce or eliminate the runaway Florida judgment against Gawker, the writer of the Hogan story and myself personally. And we expected to prevail in those other two lawsuits by clients of Charles Harder, the lawyer backed by Peter Thiel,” reads Denton’s blog post on what he termed ‘a hard peace’. “But all-out legal war with Thiel would have cost too much, and hurt too many people, and there was no end in sight.”
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