The great sin for a leader, Frederick the Great once observed, was not in being defeated but in being surprised. How did Denton not see this? How did Gawker’s chief strategy officer not see that this was a fight they could not win? Where was their publicist? Heather Dietrick, the one they had chosen to sit in the courtroom for them, who had been privy to every part of this case from the beginning—where had she been? Denton would say in retrospect that Gawker’s “audience share in Williamsburg was not decisive.” It didn’t matter what his friends in Manhattan or his readers in Brooklyn thought of
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