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The New York Times featured an interview today with Peter Thiel, the biillionare who helped found PayPal and secretly funded WWE Hall of Famer Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker for posting snippets of a sex tape that had been filmed without Hogan's knowledge several years before publication on the Gawker website. It's an extremely interesting article.
Thiel, who was publicly outed as gay before he personally disclosed that information to the public by a website owned by Gawker, claimed in the interview that he didn't fund the lawsuit out a sense of revenge and commented, "I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”
The article outing Thiel was titled, "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." Thiel commented that articles about him and others in the Silicon Valley world, including friends of his "“ruined people’s lives for no reason”, which led to Thiel seeking to undermine the website.
Thiel said that while Hogan was a millionare and famous, he did not have the resources needed to fight the legal battle necessary in the Gawker case, which is why he offered to help.
On the argument that someone like himself backing the Hogan lawsuit actually undermined the media and their freedom of the press, Thiel commented, "“I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations. I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker. It’s not like it is some sort of speaking truth to power or something going on here. The way I’ve thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. In a way, if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.”
Gawker is currently appealing the $140 million judgment against them that Hogan scored several weeks back.
To read the complete interview, click here.
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