D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A of the gross. Otherwise, the audience is like anything in nature: it keeps moving, always looking. After the suit was settled and we learned that Denton was going to have to sell his business to meet the verdict, we learned that Hogan had had a guardian angel in the person of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire investor. Thiel is famous in the financial world for his original investment in PayPal and getting in on the ground floor of a startup called Facebook. It came out that Thiel assisted Hogan and others in launching lawsuits against Gawker and Denton. I don’t know if Thiel and
Denton knew each other, despite the fact that they were both enterprising young men in San Francisco at approximately the same time. However, several years ago, Gawker—then in its tell-all glory—published something about Thiel being gay. It was an “outing” (as opposed to a picnic). Denton is gay and is said to be one of those people who believes all gay people of prominence should come out publicly. I don’t know if Thiel ever “came out” publicly, but his personal interests were generally known to a lot of people who knew him or knew of him. So, maybe it wasn’t so ironic that Denton’s Gawker was
brought down by an incident that was as ticky-tacky and curbside tawdry as a lot of the edit copy he posted daily on his website. Nevertheless, I am well aware of the effort that goes into producing fresh edit copy daily and also keeping it in a style that, aside from the cynicism, is solid and effective. I could only admire Denton’s professional ability to not only create it but to move it and grow it into the media business it became. His distress sale to Univision underscores his success. But that is New York: highly competitive in a million different ways and often highly intimidating and exasperating, especially to the younger
members of the ambitious who come here to make their ways in life. So, thinking about Hogan’s lawsuit (and the court’s $115 million order to pay) it occurred to me that, besides damaging Denton personally, the ruling may also mark a subtle change in our public consciousness. Thiel, whatever his motivations, provided a lesson for all of us when it comes to the parameters of personal privacy. The boy with the broom. James M. Nederlander, the Broadway theater-owner and producer died on Monday, July 25. Known to the world as “Jimmy,” he celebrated his 94th birthday on March 31. He leaves his wife, Charlene
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