THE SECRET AGENT?
Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis claims to have played a major role in the takedown of American blog Gawker in a personal quest for revenge – but just how big of a part did he really play? As Zach Schonfeld shows, it’s complicated
The plot to take down Gawker was like high-stakes celebrity Mad Libs. Let’s review the basics: a Silicon Valley billionaire teamed up with an ageing wrestling champ to win a major civil suit spawned by a post about a sex tape. Weirdest of all, it worked: Gawker is done; Nick Denton, its former managing editor, is bankrupt; and Hulk Hogan has been awarded $140m (£108m) in damages, pending appeal.
By any account, Gawker’s enemies are very pleased. But there was another disgruntled celebrity acting in secret to avenge a personal grudge and help destroy Gawker. That person was Joe Francis, the millionaire
softcore porn mogul best known for founding the Girls Gone Wild franchise. In several interviews during the last week of August, Francis boasted about his small but previously unknown role using language better suited to an action movie voice-over. “It was really a coordinated effort,” Francis said. “It was an all-out assault. And we got him. It was like Osama Bin Laden. I liken this operation to killing Osama bin Laden. And we did – we killed the most reckless, dangerous scumbag in the world: Nick Denton. Now, for the burial at sea, I’d like to see that too,” Francis adds.
Only Gawker went to trial. Only Gawker took the fall
Denton, though not the most dangerous scumbag in the world, did make a lot of enemies in his capacity as founder of a gossip blog widely loathed by the celebrity class. Gawker enraged Lena Dunham, outed Peter Thiel and Shepard Smith, referred to Zoe Saldana’s infant twins as “hipster scum” and – a personal favourite – once described Ted Cruz as a “noted skin-haver”. The site’s frequently barbed coverage of the rich and famous opened it up to lawsuits and made it something of a villain in celebrity circles. “They were really good at making enemies,” says Nik Richie, the blogger who runs the gossip site TheDirty.com from the West Coast.
This all leads us to Joe Francis. Back in 2009, the porno entrepreneur threatened to sue Gawker for calling him a rapist in a post that awarded him the title of “Douche of the Decade”. (Francis had been accused of rape in a Los Angeles Times profile but never convicted in a court setting. Tax evasion and bribery, sure, but not rape.) In an email to Gawker titled “Hey Nick, Your Fucked” [sic], Francis claimed that he had lost a $10m deal because of Gawker’s post and wrote, “I am going to wipe you off the grid !!!! ” (He also included a shirtless photo of himself, for some reason.) Wipe Gawker off the grid? It seemed pretty ludicrous in 2009.
Nick Denton (left) founded Gawker in 2002, but was forced to declare bankruptcy after losing the court battle (AP)
Anyway, Francis had his attorney send a letter of his own (presumably sans shirtless photo), Gawker amended “rapist” to “alleged rapist” and the gossip blog moved on – but Francis did not. His beef with Gawker deepened when they continued targeting him. “Oh my God, they wrote about me a ton,” he recalls. When Gawker’s sister blog Jezebel mocked his girlfriend’s pregnancy announcement years later, he was infuriated. “They called my daughters ‘genetically modified’,” he protests. “Number one, genetic modification is illegal. There are no genetically modified humans that I know of. But to, like, attack innocent little babies? It’s just horrible.”
Francis happened to be friendly with Hulk Hogan, whom he knows by his real name, Terry Bollea. The two met when Francis’s career briefly crossed paths with WWE in the early 2000s. Several years later, when Hogan was going through a divorce, Francis introduced him to his attorney, David Houston, who wound up advising the wrestler in the privacy suit against Gawker. (Houston, Hogan’s personal attorney, is not to be confused with Charles Harder, the Hollywood libel lawyer who was hired specifically for the case and, more recently, was hired by Roger Ailes to take on New York magazine for reporting on his ouster amid sexual harassment allegations.) Francis, meanwhile, was in and out of jail after being convicted of false imprisonment and assault charges in 2013. As Francis tells it, he allied with Hulk Hogan and his lawyer to undermine Gawker in the months and years leading up to the high-profile trial. “I would call myself a peripheral player,” he says, “who did a lot of handiwork”.
Is Joe Francis for real? According to his lawyer, Francis’s involvement in the litigation against Gawker was minor at best – barely worth a mention. According to Francis, “I’m the one who was the architect of the strategy”. He clarifies: “The initial strategy”. The truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle. Here’s what we do know: In 2012 or 2013, after Gawker published a clip from the now-infamous video of Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife, Francis took on a secret role: He worked behind the scenes to convince other sites to take down posts involving the sex tape. In a lengthy, late-night phone interview, Francis outlined his involvement. His storytelling was animated and fast, peppered with a maniacal laugh and vulgar asides – “Don’t call me a fucking rapist, asshole. I have three sisters” – aimed at Denton. “I worked the phones,” Francis says. “I called in every favour I possibly could with every media outlet I knew so we had one clean shot. One clean bad actor. One clean target. So there would be no other person in that courtroom but Gawker.”
His bravado is almost Trumpian. He says he devoted ‘millions of dollars of time’ into the project but won’t say how
Houston tells the story differently: He had Francis call Nik Richie because he knew the two were friends and he wanted Francis to “facilitate an introduction” – basically, to explain why the attorney would be contacting him. Houston’s goal was to scrub his client’s embarrassing sex tape from the Internet. But for Francis, the goal was to make Gawker’s sin seem uniquely – and irredeemably—outrageous. “If David had sent cease and desist letters, those would have been admissible,” Francis says. “These had to be very, very quiet under-the-table deals with all these people who were my personal relationships.” Otherwise, it would have weakened the case against Gawker. “Nick Denton would have been able to walk into the court and say, ‘Everybody else did it’.” (In an email, Denton stated that he knew Francis and Hogan shared a lawyer, but wasn’t aware of Francis’s involvement. He declined to comment further. A. J. Daulerio, the former Gawker editor who published the sex tape, said he knew nothing about it.)
Richie, a longtime Francis pal, confirms that Francis called asking him to take down the grainy still photographs from the sex tape. According to his records, two such posts were removed on 8 May, 2013 – shortly after Gawker refused a judge’s order to take down the video. Richie didn’t think it was motivated by a vendetta. “I think he was just trying to help his lawyer,” Richie says. After he chatted with Hogan himself, he agreed to remove the posts. It didn’t seem worth going to war over. “I don’t know what Joe’s personal thing is with Gawker,” he says. “No one really likes Gawker. Us West Coast people, we just don’t get how they think they have all the power out there.”
Hulk Hogan won his case against Gawker in the $140m privacy lawsuit (Reuters)
Francis says he went so far as to have TheDirty.com erase the metadata to clear evidence of the sex tape post. Richie can’t remember whether that happened. “The only reason I do find it strange is because we were the ones who broke the story,” Richie says, “and it looks like Gawker took the fall. But we were cooperative, so it’s different.” True to its name, The Dirty showed screenshots from the sex tape months before Gawker ran with it. But the site’s involvement was lost during the trial. “Nobody’s contacted me,” Richie says. “Not even from Gawker’s side.” Strange, right? “A hundred percent,” he admits. Francis says he rang up other gossip rags to do the Hulk’s bidding. “At every fucking turn, this took so much effort to do. Everybody wanted to jump on to this story. And I said, jump out of this story.” He continues, “I sat on the phone for days, begging friends in the media: ‘Pull it fucking down’ and calling off favours.” For who?
“TMZ, all these guys. I traded information, too. Paid them off. Whatever I could do.” Paid them off? “Not me personally. But some of them were paid off.”
So where does Joe Francis fit into this? Perhaps nowhere
A few days later, when asked to clarify the tidbit about the alleged payments, Francis backtracked. Did you ask TMZ to take down the sex tape as well? “No comment.” And did any of these sites get paid off? “Nope.” No, they did not get paid off? “Not to the best of my knowledge.” He wouldn’t name other sites. TMZ denies any involvement. An email query asking whether the site amended its sex tape coverage on Francis’s orders drew a hasty rebuke from a spokesperson: “No and you are completely off base”. A subsequent email was more specific: “Of course we have reported on the existence of the sex tape. However, to reiterate, we have never altered these reports at the request of Joe Francis or Hulk Hogan’s lawyers.” TMZ ignored follow-up emails asking for clarification. David Houston says he contacted more than 80 sites after the sex tape broke. “All agreed to remove the offending content or not publish,” he said.
Only Gawker went to trial. Only Gawker took the fall. Strangely, Francis seems to give himself credit for securing Hogan’s secret benefactor – the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel – though there is scant evidence to support this narrative. “I am the reason that [Hogan] got the benefactor ... and I am the one who arranged for his lawyers,” Francis claimed in his first email to Newsweek, in response to a request for comment on Gawker’s demise. “I have known about this for years and never talked about it.”
Thiel’s decision to finance the case ‘was the ultimate,’ Francis claims
Thiel, who made a fortune as the co-founder of PayPal, has spent years plotting his revenge. He was outed publicly by Gawker in 2007. In subsequent years, the blog mocked his business ventures and his rather bewildering comments on women’s suffrage. So he bankrolled its collapse. Francis says that he met Thiel when he was neighbours with Elon Musk. Nursing a grudge of his own, “Peter Thiel was interested in backing anyone he could,” Francis says. “But [he was] also looking for the right opportunity. His lawyers reached out to my lawyers.” The Hogan suit provided Thiel with the opportunity he craved: he paid millions in legal fees to finance the lawsuit. Thiel defended this frostily served revenge in a New York Times interview, describing his funding as being “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence” aimed at a “terrible bully”. (Francis, to his credit, doesn’t bother with these PR-friendly euphemisms for revenge.)
Thiel’s decision to finance the case “was the ultimate,” Francis claims. “That took an incredible amount off of all of us,” he says. Attorney David Houston contradicts this account: “It wasn’t really that much of a turning point one way or another.” It’s not the only place his story diverges from his client’s. Francis says he was having Houston threaten legal action against Gawker long before the Hogan lawsuit. Houston says he hadn’t even heard of Gawker before this suit. Observers have been more concerned about the long-term implications of Thiel’s actions than the minutia of how it came about: what does it mean when a billionaire can use his fortune to destroy a publication he deems objectionable? Mother Jones faced a legal battle of its own against an embittered businessman with nearly limitless resources. And on Labor Day, news broke that ousted Fox News Chief Roger Ailes had enlisted Charles Harder, the lawyer who brought down