Does billionaire-funded lawsuit against Gawker create playbook for punishing press?
This article by Clay Calvert originally appears on The Conversation on May 29, 2016.
Word last week that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled wrestler Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker added a wrinkle to a case already featuring colorful characters and a US$140 million jury verdict.
At a sensational and personal level, the story highlights the animus between PayPal co-founder Thiel and Gawker founder Nick Denton stemming from a 2007 gossip item that publicly outed Thiel as gay. Thiel sees Denton as “a singularly terrible bully” who invades privacy for profit. In turn, Denton sympathetically portrays Gawker, in an open letter to Thiel, as “a small New York media company” being bullied by a man with “a net worth of more than $2 billion.”
But regardless of whether it’s framed as a personal battle between Thiel and Denton or a larger one between protecting privacy and a free press, the revelation raises important questions about third-party financed litigation targeting U.S. news media outlets that are safeguarded under the First Amendment.
Most importantly, should third-party-funded litigation against news organizations be banned by lawmakers? This is the kind of issue I explore at the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida, which I’ve directed for the past six years, and in my book about privacy and articles about various threats to a free press.
