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

by Ryan Holiday

here, when it matters, Denton doesn’t seem to have much fight left in him.

One side lays the groundwork to present their narrative in word, in image, and in digital—the other, cutting corners, finds themselves mostly lecturing.

And doing it to an audience that had already begun to tune out the condescending lecturing from cosmopolitan media types in their life generally, not just in a courtroom.

They assumed Hogan would settle because everyone settles. This was never an unreasonable position—and certainly they had done everything they could to push him in that direction.

But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they took this assumption as

a rea...

They took hypothesis...

This case will...

he didn’t want to win badly enough to prepare,

that it felt beneath him to need to defend something he clearly believed was protected.

Gawker had no backup plan, no line on the true perspective of a jury, and in fact would soon find that the tactics and hard-line negotiations of the intervening years would be held up as evidence against them.

Gawker’s headlines, Denton’s interviews, would all look terrible at trial.

Only after it was too late did they realize this.

Hope is rarely enough.

Especially against an opponent who has come to be consumed by their cause, who can see and taste victory now, and will do everything they can to seal it.

Thiel’s team would recount to me, several times, a discovery which they would exploit, which very well might have been the deciding factor in the entire case. In those expensive mock juries, they had discovered that their case played exceedingly well to a very specific type of person.

“It became very clear that the kind of jurors we wanted were overweight women.

Most people can’t empathize with a sex tape, but overweight women are sensitive about their bodies and feel like they have been bullied on the internet. Men don’t have that problem. Attractive women do...

she knows what it’s like to have an unflattering picture of herself on the internet. She knows what it feels like to be embarrassed or ashamed.

There is no smirking youth culture represented here. This is a jury who would say during the selection process that they got most of their news from Fox News, from the local news, from Yahoo, from MSN, not from blogs, not from Twitter.

Hogan has a performer’s eye. He knows the “smoke and mirrors” of the entertainment business, as he likes to say, he knows what it means to love and work a crowd.

“If you want to win, ‘ego is the enemy,’” Peter would say, “and the anti-ego thing we did was downgrade Harder’s role in the trial.

Harder was not happy about this. It was the case of your lifetime and you get to have a much smaller part in it than you originally thought?

But if we win, you get to ta...

He’s one of them, and as a true local, Vogt can better sell to them

Berry is the opposite of Shane Vogt, not relatable or confident.

He is everything Harder would have been stereotyped as if he had opened the case: a foreigner, a carpetbagger, someone we’re not sure we like.

“They were in my ring,” Hogan would say. “They screwed up. Getting in front of real people. That’s where they screwed up.” The confidence rises with this realization.

I have heard Peter Thiel say over and over again that in the trial, Gawker argued the law while Hogan’s case argued the facts.

“You argue the law to show how much you know about the law,” he would say, “but it’s not how you win a case in front of a jury.”

Facts are stubborn things, and no amount of legal maneuvering could blunt them fully, not in court anyway. The person who wins the jury is the one who tells the most compelling story. Whoever is most human and personable wins.

All of Gawker’s delays would work against it at trial, too,

The internet was no longer new and exciting, but a part of normal life. New norms, new concerns about technology and privacy had developed in that time and they were conservative norms. Many were established in response to some of the horrible events that had happened publicly via blogs and social media.

The world had changed, and Gawker’s place in that world—a company with millions in revenue, with a valuation in the hundreds of millions—had changed, too.

What would ultimately be the undoing of Gawker was the simple fact that they came across as genuinely unsympathetic.

what they stood for was incomprehensible.

a trial, almost nothing new happens. All of the information presented has been proposed and reproposed and discussed and fought over a hundred times. All of it has been practiced in the mirror—the

the trial is just the performance of all that practice.

The great sin for a leader, Frederick the Great once observed, was not in being defeated but in being surprised.

“PR can be powerful, it can be effective, but it can always backfire when you start to believe it too much.

They needed to say they were sorry. If they had done that, they would’ve survived.

Instead, they insisted on the right...

This trial was an exercise in stupidity. A smart person would have seen

that even an insincere apology would have made all the difference.

A smart person would never have let it get this far. Whether the conspirators were brilliant or just rich can reasonably be argued, but what is indisputable is the fact that their victims marched toward their ...

Does Nick feel in that moment, the way A.J. had, what so many Gawker subjects had felt over the years?

Does he understand now what his own medicine tastes like?

Nick pats A.J. on the leg. “We’ll appeal.” But he won’t—they can’t. Denton

has forgotten or miscalculated because the buy-in to appeal in Florida is a bond equal to the verdict, capped at $50 million.

Perhaps if they’d better prepared for the contingency of losing this badly, there would have b...