Page 13 - Gawker

Consequently, Gawker’s attitude and actions made it the

obvious destination for the Hogan sex video. The video

ended up with Gawker’s editor, Daulerio, who promptly

published, drawing more than five million page views, a viral

success for Gawker at a time when celebrity sex tapes were

popping up everywhere.

In May 2016 Denton, in an interview with the New York

Times, claimed that the financial backing of Hulk Hogan’s

court case expenses were underwritten by someone in

Silicon Valley. “If you’re a billionaire and you don’t like the
coverage of you, and you don’t particularly want to embroil

yourself any further in a public scandal, it’s a pretty smart,

rational thing to fund other legal cases,” (8)

Later Denton claimed that “Just because Peter Thiel is a Silicon

Valley billionaire, his opinion does not trump our millions of

readers who know us for routinely driving big news stories
including Hillary Clinton’s secret email account, Bill Cosby’s

history with women, the mayor of Toronto as a crack smoker,

Tom Cruise’s role within Scientology, the N.F.L. cover-up of

domestic abuse by players and just this month the hidden
power of Facebook to determine the news you see.”(8)