Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

by Ryan Holiday

Heather Dietrick would explain beliefs about the jury to reporters at the time: “I think as a common-sense matter, they’re going to see that, see what he’s talked about in the past,” she would say. “He’s talked about really, really graphic details of his sex life, again and again and again, including on the shock jock’s show. These are practical people. I think they’re going to see through him and say, ‘Give me a break. Take responsibility for what you did here.’” Oh, Heather. How could you? She should have been telling her boss to settle, rectifying before it was too late the error Denton and the legal department had made in not seeing Hogan’s perspective “as a human being” when that cease and desist first came in. Instead she was needling the victim in the media. She was lying to herself and to the people who worked at Gawker. She had it all wrong. “The external positioning for a year and a half leading up to trial,” Thiel says of Gawker, “was that Hogan’s case was terrible, and if he won it would be a small amount that would get reversed on appeal. If you have a propaganda line that you keep telling people, there’s some point at which you have to start believing it.”