Yes, that's a TL;DR headline but I'm trying to sum up the argument that I just read over at Gawker - and I had a feeling he would pull this, I called it a week ago. Nick Denton the puppet-master behind the Gawker media gossip blogs, is apparently the kind of guy who kicks you in the balls when you've knocked him down. Barking up a storm in his post The Hogan Verdict, he attempts an impressive DARVO move trying to pin all of this fail on Hulk Hogan himself. DARVO stands for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender." and is a classic reaction that perpetrators display when they are held accountable for their behaviour. Nick Denton states:
Hogan did not sue us, as he has claimed, to recover damages from the emotional distress he purportedly experienced upon our revelation in 2012 of a sexual encounter with his best friend’s wife, Heather Cole (then Heather Clem). It turns out this case was never about the sex on the tape Gawker received, but about racist language on another, unpublished tape that threatened Hogan’s reputation and career.
But... the First Amendment remains. It's kind of insane, in the first place, that there even was a trial at all on the question of "how newsworthy" the tape was. Whether or not you or I think running the tape is appropriate, the fact remains that courts should never be determining if something is newsworthy.
True that. But the courts weren't deciding whether anything was newsworthy, they were looking at invasion of privacy. Hypothetically a Catholic Priest who lobbies against gay marriage yet is caught with his pants down with a choir boy, that's a newsworthy story and... it can be told without publishing the sex tape! Just like when Carol Burnett won over The Enquirer, the courts weren't saying that rags can't gossip about celebrities, but they were looking at "actual malice" in the fact that the rag went out of their way to print shit they knew were lies. The first amendment isn't hurt by the fact that the press need to have an editorial process of fact checking, and should stay out of peoples secretly taped bedroom antics. (As a side note, the Court also found that the National Enquirer did not qualify as a "newspaper" - so Gawker might wanna watch their step with this FREDOOM OF THE PRESS RAH-RAH defense since they were never considered "press" by anyones standards.) Hulk Hogan talks about the trial in an interview with the New York Post. In it he tells of his reaction to some of the testimony.
“They think that just because you have Facebook or Twitter, you crossed the line between normal person to celebrity status. So that means anyone who has anything to do with social media is fair game. He said that as he heard their testimony during the trial, “I started having, like Oprah has, these ‘aha’ moments. … Everybody’s a celebrity,’ I thought. ‘Oh, my God, they’re gunning for everybody. Everybody is fair game. And then 4-year-olds, too?’”
, and if Albert J. Daulerio has his way anyone is game except children under the age of four. In GQ magazine interview Albert J. Daulerio was dubbed 'The Worldwide Leader in Sextapes'. He describes paying $12,000 (Gawkers cash) for a blurry photo of someones crotch - while the court in Florida knows he personally has no assets, only $27,000 in student debt. You'd think that at some point while handling that kind of money for cock-shots one might think "what the hell am I doing with my life?"
Before posting the photos and voice mails, Daulerio argued with Gawker's lawyer and chief operating officer, Gaby Darbyshire, over legal exposure. "She's like, 'You're willing to go to jail for this? It's just a dong shot,' " Daulerio recalls. "And I'm like, 'It's fucking Brett Favre's cock shot.' So yeah. If Brett Favre sued or [the pictures] were subpoenaed—I don't think they'd send me to jail for that, but given the choice, sure."
They're just digging through the seedy underbelly of the internet, paying crack-dealers $200,000 for cellphone videos and stalkers $12,000 for blurry dong pics. Oh, and they crowd-source you to help - via your clicks and a literal kickstarter. The Gawker brand is bullying, it always has been and it won't change. You remember high school, don't you? You can hang with the bullies on the cool table if you want, but it's only a matter of time until they turn on you.
