Conspiracy, p.20
Conspiracy, page 20
The call to the benefactor: we couldn’t get it done. The new trial won’t be for another nine months. Just as conspiracies are rushed forward by events, they can be interminably delayed and disrupted by them.
Harder and his team were already in Florida, practicing their final arguments. Even the media had been certain enough of the dates that they’d made dozens of travel accommodations for hotels, restaurants, and parking lots which, when they were suddenly and abruptly canceled, rippled through the economy of Pinellas County. Mostly the setback ripples through the morale of the conspirators. It is a discouraging thing to have fixed the noose, to have made your preparations, to have mentally told yourself that today is the day, only to have the person slip out of it at the final second. Do you doubt your hunches here? Do you reconsider all the calculations that you’ve made? Do you give in? The critical question then is how you respond to this setback, a setback far more serious and demoralizing than the trough of sorrow which happens earlier—for this is when you felt like you could taste victory, that it was within your grasp.
Churchill once compared an offensive force to throwing a bucket of water over the floor: “It rushes forward, then soaks forward, and finally stops altogether until another bucket can be brought.” It’s the moment in between those buckets when a conspiracy is most vulnerable, because the combination of stasis and exposure begins to evaporate those ties that bind. But even more than that, it is here that one has the brief time to reflect and consider: Is it worth another try? Do I have it in me? Perhaps the judge had known that both sides would soon be reaching such a moment, that they would be asking themselves this fundamental question of will, because a few days before her ruling, she had warned them, “This is way too early in the game to be getting tired.”
“There was real second guessing,” Peter explains. “Are we totally wrong about everything here? And were our timelines wrong? Maybe none of our cases are going to work and maybe this whole plan doesn’t make sense.”
Gawker’s legal strategy had been designed to create these kinds of doubts. To make its opponents think: Maybe we can’t afford to beat them. Because if someone did beat Gawker, there would be a land rush of enemies coming to pile on after the precedent was set. “The conversation in early 2015 was ‘We are going to bankrupt you. We are going to destroy you, we will run out the clock. Doesn’t matter if you have a good or bad case. You’re going to run out of money.’ They made that argument against Hulk Hogan,” Thiel says. “‘You will get no justice because you have no money.’” The problem is that Hulk Hogan and Charles Harder were in a position to defer that message to someone not well deposed to heed it. Peter Thiel had at first despaired of a fight with Gawker because he felt a certain powerlessness, that it was a media outlet, that it had the First Amendment to hide behind and there was nothing he could do about it. Now here, at least in this specific instance, seeing Gawker’s legal strategy laid bare, that power imbalance is flipped. There is something about the arrogance of Nick Denton’s position that grates on Thiel, that drives him to continue almost out of spite, to spend whatever it takes to win. Mr. A is asking Peter Thiel if he’s willing to still fight it out, to go another nine months. It would fall on Thiel here, would they continue? and the answer coming from the other end of the line is “Yes.”
And so the next bucket of water is brought and the water rushes forward. Right to the next crisis.
On July 16 in the evening, a Gawker writer named Jordan Sargent, filling his quota of posts and page views, and not thinking a single thought about the lawsuit that had been hanging over his employer for years, writes a post that outs the married CFO of Condé Nast—the brother of a well-known and well-liked cabinet member of the Obama administration, a man with three children, who was being extorted by a male escort. In a previous era, it would have been the type of story that Gawker insiders would have loved—a salacious personal story that exposes the hypocrisy or shame of a competitor. But this time the public response was swift and decisive: they were appalled. No one enjoyed gawking at this. It is branded “gay-shaming,” and the writer is accused of ruining the man’s life. A well-known journalist would describe the article as “reprehensible beyond belief,” calling Gawker “deranged” to even consider publishing it. Lena Dunham, who had tangled with Gawker as one of Harder’s last clients at Wolf Rifkin, would tweet, “How many cruel and unnecessary stories must Gawker publish before people realize this isn’t a fun site to browse over their cereal?” Calls for advertiser boycotts would begin anew, this time with more than just video game nerds cheering them on.
The world had not stood still in the years since Gawker launched, and readers were far less inclined to look at being gay as a secret to expose, as they had been when it had been done to Peter Thiel. Denton himself, the man who had complained about the misplaced sense of decency, is horrified, too. “This is the very, very worst version of the company. I don’t want some guy blowing his brains out and that being on our hands,” he would say to his staff. He’s also smart enough to be horrified by how it looks: this is not what he wants, but more important, it’s exactly what he doesn’t need right now. He has spent millions of dollars in court trying to prove that Gawker is a reputable website that does good, important, and ethical work; that exists well within the outer limitations of the First Amendment protections afforded to publishers and people alike. Now, when the strategy could not be more precious, one of his own writers not only undermines it, but obliterates the notion.
To Nick’s credit, he moves quickly. He pulls the story with a short explanation: “I believe this public mood reflects a growing recognition that we all have secrets and they are not all equally worthy of exposure. The point of this story was not in my view sufficient to offset the embarrassment to the subject and his family.” The staff at Gawker mutinies and several resign, strongly believing that this is exactly the kind of article that Gawker was built to publish, that they had come to the site to be given the ability to publish. Denton writes a post to the editorial staff:
This is the company I built. I was ashamed to have my name and Gawker’s associated with a story on the private life of a closeted gay man who some felt had done nothing to warrant the attention. We believe we were within our legal right to publish, but it defied the 2015 editorial mandate to do stories that inspire pride, and made impossible the jobs of those most committed to defending such journalism.
The irony of this position is not lost on the conspirators. It’s an opportunity for Denton to check his assumptions, too, to reexamine the stand he has taken here with Hogan about running the surreptitiously recorded sex tape of a famous man and an unfamous woman, but he can’t. Or at least he doesn’t. He’s put too much into this case. He’s fought it publicly for too long to give in now. His rhetoric had boxed him in.
But any enjoyment of Denton’s predicament, watching him squirm and seeing his hypocrisy laid out in undeniable publicness, would not last long for Harder or Thiel. Within a few days, the conspirators would be reeling from their own self-inflicted blow.
It would be rooted in their own dark hypocrisy: the audio from the sex tapes which would finally expose to the public what Hulk Hogan had vented about in that bedroom, what he’d hoped would never come out. The thing that Bubba Clem had said he could retire off, the venomously awful, sickening things that Hogan had said when he thought he was in private. When he’d been unguarded enough to repeatedly use the word “nigger” to describe his daughter’s boyfriend, who he deeply disliked. “I mean, I am a racist, to a point,” he says, and then punctuates it with “fucking niggers.” “I guess we’re all a little racist,” he says, ending again with “Fucking nigger” like it’s a perfectly normal way to wrap up a thought.
How do these tapes get out? How does the transcript make its way to the press? No one is sure. Rumors of their existence had been floating around since Keith Davidson’s client shopped them to websites. The client could have leaked them, or he could have been sloppy with his sharing at some point over the last few years. Davidson himself could have leaked them. We do know that Gawker had maneuvered for some time to get access to them, had warned repeatedly in mediation and in hearings that these comments might someday get out. Denton had alluded to them in a blog post right before the trial, promising the reveal of a “third act” in the case. Gawker would finally get confirmation of these rumors and access to the tapes when the FBI handed over their evidence of the sting, which included the audio of Hogan’s and Houston’s microphones as they sat in that hotel room with the extortionist, forced to listen to those racist comments played back to them. We know that just a few days after Gawker got those tapes, just as Gawker was imploding around a press crisis of its own making, Hogan’s comments are made public, and now the story changes.
Who leaked them matters only so much. The impact is enormous. Hogan is indisputably the bad guy again. And Gawker moves to take advantage of it, finally telling a compelling story of the case as A.J. had demanded. Its story about Hogan’s comments after the leak does 750,000 views.
A friend said that it wasn’t that Denton was without ethics, just that sometimes he lost sight of them. Literally minutes (fourteen minutes to be exact) after the National Enquirer broke the story that exposed Hogan’s comments, A. J. Daulerio’s blog, Ratter, which had received a $500,000 investment from Nick Denton, tweeted “XOXOXO” to Hogan and shared the link to the story. We know from a later admission that A.J. had long considered leaking them himself. We know that he could have done it. We just don’t know if he did. There is video you can watch of Nick Denton, recorded after the trial, speaking about the tape of Hogan’s comments. In it, a year of expert public relations falls away, and the darker, vicious side of Denton appears if only in a gesture. “The irony is that it probably would have never come out,” he says of the tapes. “Would it have come out?” Denton asks rhetorically. The implication hangs there. Would it have come out if Hogan had not pushed him toward trial, if Hogan had walked away when he and Heather Dietrick had said they would let him walk away? Denton pauses. Shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think it would have come out.” Yet even if Gawker is responsible, if Denton had launched his V1 rocket in a final attempt to break the will of his opponent, even if these tapes were irrelevant to the trial at hand, it doesn’t change the fact that Hogan said those words—that he had laid this trap for himself years ago already and now he had fallen in it.
Hogan’s family is mortified. He is kicked out of the WWE Hall of Fame. He loses the rest of his endorsements. People had been disappointed in the sex tape, but here—here they were disgusted. The shoes Gawker had walked a thousand miles in were now on other feet, and their wearer was just as disgusted with himself as everyone else was—because he knew they were right to be. It was the worst thing he’d ever done, ever said. There was nothing he could do to take back those words.
Harder had warned Hogan that these comments might come out. Hogan had proceeded anyway, telling himself that it didn’t matter. “I knew it was coming. I knew what would happen if I kept pushing, but no, I just couldn’t walk away.” He wanted to win so badly he thought it worth the risk. But that had been theoretical. Now he had run the risk and the dice didn’t go his way.
It should be said that Gawker’s legal team had always and reasonably held a basic assumption, and it’s one that undergirds the litigation system: people will act in their rational self-interest. Hogan, disowned by all his allies and friends, losing his remaining income, exposed and vulnerable for a second time, should have had to quit. The rational thing would be to drop the case. This is what Gawker thought. At some point, the other side gets tired of being hit and lacks the energy to keep hitting back. This is what its highly paid legal advisers had been telling them and were telling them now.
Except it didn’t quite go that way. Not only because Peter Thiel is funding the case in the shadows. There is one upside to losing it all. What is it? At least for a conspirator, now you have nothing left to lose.
There is the famous story sometimes told of Aeneas, sometimes of Cortés, sometimes of Xiang Yu, who ordered their ships burned or sunk so the men have nowhere to go but forward, so there was no chance of returning home the way they had come. Thiel and Harder had done nothing so deliberate as far as keeping Terry Bollea committed. Nick Denton, or whoever had leaked those tapes, had done it for them.
Hogan can’t walk away anymore. I’ll quote it again from Machiavelli: “Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.” He was dangerous before, when he had been humiliated and exposed. But there was a chance that reason might win out. That an apology might take the sting out of his shame and a reasonable settlement offer might salve the remaining wounds. Whatever it was, Gawker counted on his giving up at some point. Even his backers had to consider the contingency that he might eventually settle and leave them without a client. That had always been the risk in an arrangement where the client got to make shots. Hogan could have made the call to walk away while he was ahead. Now, that’s gone. There is nothing left for him. To borrow a phrase from Robert Frost, there is no way out but through Gawker.
Denton, too, thought that Gawker could afford to beat the risks it was taking. “We have a higher tolerance for risk than most organizations,” he would say, to himself and to the media as they approached the trial. Gawker had always been willing to face the odds that other companies wouldn’t. It would write stories that others wouldn’t. It would fight cases other companies would settle, go to war with entities others were afraid to touch. But with this case, Gawker’s team was facing the reality of that risk, and the backlash of the scrutiny it had brought upon them. Now, here they were feeling that pressure, feeling the real cost of the odds. Thiel, too, had always been the man who made contrarian bets, who sought out the uncrowded trades, who was willing to be mocked and scorned if he thought he was right. His bet here isn’t public, but he can see what the public thinks of his horse.
It’s not even a matter of winning anymore. Both sides have spent several million dollars thus far. Both have made huge wagers on their public reputations. Peter can’t walk away. What if Gawker eventually discovered he was behind it and was still around to do something in retaliation? What if the media found out, some ten years in the future, that he’d launched a conspiracy, only to bungle it and fail? He’d look terrible. There is another not so small consideration: Thiel had persuaded Hogan and other people to come this far; he couldn’t simply quit on them.
Gawker’s reputation is on the line. Nick, A.J., John Cook, Max Read, and now Jordan Sargent had put it there. They’d all said publicly, either explicitly or implicitly, that Gawker would win. This was a First Amendment issue, they’d said a thousand times, as much to convince themselves probably as to sway public perception, and they were the only ones brave enough to fight it. They couldn’t walk back that kind of rhetoric. And perhaps they had also begun to sense—if not consciously—that this is not just an ordinary opponent they are fighting against, that this isn’t going to stop unless Gawker wins decisively.
At Shiloh, Ulysses S. Grant had been caught by surprise. Flush off two victories, convinced he had superior resources and tactics, he was confident he would win. Yet he had thrown everything he had at the Confederates and been thrown back. It had begun to pour rain on the troops as they attempted to settle in for the night. Grant had seriously injured his leg in a fall a few weeks before. He is desperately short of reinforcements. Sherman finds him and begins to politely discuss plans for retreat. He says to him, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant, backlit by the camp lantern, squints as he clamps down on the stub of his cigar, “Yes. Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” And this is precisely what happens. Napoleon, too, describes warfare in that simple way: Two armies are hurled at each other and both are thrown into confusion and disarray by the force of the collision. Victory is simple. It goes to whoever reassembles and redoubles first. If either party thinks this would be a chance to rest, they are wrong.
All are scrambling now—Gawker, Thiel, Hogan—not to try to get an advantage but for their very survival. They have collided with great force and are thrown into disarray. Publicly reviled, any could be down for the count. Is it stubbornness that keeps them going? Foolhardiness? Determination? Boldness? A death wish? What remains is simple: who will get to their feet fastest, confidently tell themselves “Lick ’em tomorrow” . . . and mean it?
CHAPTER 14
Who Wants It More?
Every conspiracy, every campaign, is a battle of wills. Of the conspirators, of the defense, of the laws of nature. All these forces are intersecting, interacting with one another.
And though we’d like to think that planning and resources—or righteousness and worthiness—determine who wins and who loses, they don’t. So often these things come down to a simple factor: Who wants it more?
Hillary Clinton spent her whole life trying to become president. She began her final campaign nearly two years before the election, cutting off at the pass anyone within her party who might seriously challenge her. She raised more money than you could ever possibly need. Donald Trump was underprepared, erratic, constantly in his own way. But it cannot be said that he did not want to win very badly. He wanted to win even more than Hillary. The last few weeks of the election made that fact indisputable. She had already won in her mind, she felt she deserved it. Trump, on the other hand, was willing to do anything, go anywhere, bear any shame, tell any lie, ally with any group if it meant he could take it from her.
