Gawker reacted to the initial reports by saying: "There are very serious questions about whether Hulk Hogan financially benefited, and this case is far from over." Hogan's lawyers wouldn't comment on the Thiel story earlier Wednesday for The Associated Press, before Thiel spoke publicly.
Thiel did not release any other public statements Wednesday night.
#WHO FUNDED HULK HOGAN IN GAWKER TRIAL CRACK#
Next year's Olympics are pushing Paris to confront crack cocaine use on city streets In a way, if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this," Thiel told the Times. "The way I’ve thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, was outed as gay by a Gawker-owned website in 2007, and the Gawker empire has run a number of stories skewering Facebook he still sits on the social network's board. "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," Thiel said in the interview with columnist Aaron Ross Sorkin, which was posted online Wednesday night. They also noted that Hogan's legal team decided not to file a claim that would trigger a payout from Gawker's legal insurance, which they said struck legal observers as odd. This week, rumors swirled that Thiel paid for the case, with reports in Forbes and the Times citing anonymous sources that the billionaire paid for the suit. The case threatens to put Gawker and its sister websites, like Deadspin and Jezebel, out of business. A billionaire tech mogul rumored to be behind Hulk Hogan's high-profile lawsuit against Gawker has admitted he bankrolled the case, telling The New York Times Wednesday that he wanted to put the gossip website out of business.Īccording to the Times interview, PayPal founder Peter Thiel quietly put $10 million into funding lawyers to find people Gawker had written about and plan cases against them.Ī Florida jury awarded $140 million to Hogan in March in a verdict against Gawker, which had posted a video of him having sex with his then-best friend's wife.
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