Since starting at Big League Politics earlier this month, Fairbanks has written stories that announced a series of rallies against sharia law and repeated a since-debunked claim about a popular pro-Trump conspiracy theory linking the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich to WikiLeaks. Fairbanks is among a crop of vigorously pro-Trump writers - along with Mike Cernovich (who posed next to Fairbanks in the image in question), the self-described “national security reporter” who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and Jack Posobiec, the writer and activist who planted fake “Rape Melania” signs at an anti-Trump demonstration - who have enjoyed proximity and access to an administration that sees few friends in the traditional press. Now she works for Big League Politics, a new, far-right politics site founded by a former staffer of Breitbart, the far-right news site previously run by Steve Bannon, President Trump’s controversial chief strategist. “The First Amendment is meant to protect the Cassandra Fairbanks’ of the journalism world: independent, alternative voices of truth in a sea of fake news.”Īt the time of the photograph at issue, Fairbanks was an employee of the Russian government-owned website Sputnik. In the suit, Barnes pits “independent, outsider writers, scribes, advocates, and journalists… a new media” against an “increasingly distrusted elite-backed press.” Mainstream media organizations “view the First Amendment as a wholly owned property of elite-backed journalists to smear and slime their adversaries at will,” the complaint reads. In the complaint, shared with BuzzFeed News, lawyers for Cassandra Fairbanks allege that Emma Roller, the Fusion journalist, defamed their client when she tweeted an image of Fairbanks at the White House making what Roller claimed in a caption is a “white power hand gesture.”įairbanks is represented by Robert Barnes, a Malibu attorney best known for high-profile clients such as Wesley Snipes and Ralph Nader.
If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.A pro-Trump journalist and political activist sued a Fusion reporter in federal court in Washington, DC, Thursday, the most serious action yet in the emerging conflict between mainstream news outlets and the insurgent conservative media that has set up shop in the nation’s capital.
In a way, if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. "The way I’ve thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. "It’s not like it is some sort of speaking-truth-to-power or something going on here," Thiel said. He estimated that the litigation has cost him around $10 million, and added he has no current plans to sue other news outlets. Thiel's backing explains why Hogan refused three different settlement offers from Gawker. Gawker CEO Nick Denton has long said that he plans to win the case further down the line, on appeal. Thiel added that "it's safe to say" that this isn't the only case against Gawker that he has financed, and that he thinks of it as "one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done."Įarlier on Wednesday, a state court judge in Florida upheld the jury's March verdict. "Even someone like Terry Bollea, who is a millionaire and famous and a successful person, didn’t quite have the resources to do this alone," Thiel said. "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." "It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," Thiel said.
Gawker lawsuit pro#
Hogan won a $140 million verdict against Gawker earlier this year for violating his privacy by publishing a video featuring the pro wrestler having sex with his friend's wife.īut Thiel says he began paying attorneys to scout for lawsuits that he could fund against Gawker Media years ago, after being prompted by "one of my friends convinced me that if I didn’t do something, nobody would." The Silicon Valley billionaire told the New York Times that he was upset about a 2007 article outing him as gay, among other stories. Peter Thiel says he backed Hulk Hogan's lawsuits against Gawker Media in order to punish the publisher for stories it ran about him and his friends.
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