Grudge Gone Wild
Why Joe Francis’s secret war against Gawker is still secret
THE PLOT TO take down Gawker was like highstakes celebrity Mad Libs: A Silicon Valley billionaire teamed up with an aging wrestler to win a civil suit over a post about a sex tape. And it worked: Gawker.com is done, its former managing editor, Nick Denton, is bankrupt; and Hulk Hogan’s been awarded $140 million in damages. By any account, Gawker’s enemies are very pleased.
But few know there was another disgruntled celebrity working to destroy Gawker: Joe Francis, the millionaire soft-core porn mogul best known for the Girls Gone Wild franchise. In several interviews with Newsweek, Francis boasted about his role, using language better suited to the voice-over for an action movie. “It was an all-out assault,” he says. “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.”
Denton (not the most dangerous scumbag in the world) did make a lot of enemies with his blog. Gawker enraged Lena Dunham, outed Peter Thiel and Shepard Smith, referred to Zoe Saldana’s infant twins as “hipster scum” and once described Ted Cruz as a “noted skin-haver.”
“They were really good at making enemies,” says Nik Richie, a blogger who runs the gossip site Thedirty.com.
Which leads us to Francis. 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 was never convicted. Tax evasion and bribery, sure, but not rape.) In an email to Gawker titled “Hey Nick, Your Fucked” [ sic], Francis claimed he had lost a $10 million deal because of Gawker’s post and wrote, “I am going to wipe you off the grid!!!!”
Wipe Gawker off the grid? That must have sounded pretty ludicrous in 2009.
Francis had his attorney send a letter to Gawker, which amended “rapist” to “alleged rapist.” But his beef with the site deepened when it continued targeting him. When Gawker’s sister blog Jezebel mocked his girlfriend’s pregnancy announcement years later, he was infuriated. “They called my daughters ‘genetically modified! Number one, genetic modification is illegal.... But to, like, attack innocent little babies? It’s just horrible.”
Francis happened to be friendly with Hulk Hogan, and when Hogan was going through a divorce, Francis introduced him to his attorney, David Houston, who later advised the wrestler in his privacy suit against Gawker. (Houston, Hogan’s personal attorney, is not to be confused with Charles Harder, the Hollywood libel lawyer hired specifically for the case.) Francis, meanwhile, was in and out of jail after being convicted of false imprisonment and assault in 2013. As Francis tells it, he allied with Hogan and his lawyer to get Gawker. “I would call myself a peripheral player,” he says, “who did a lot of handiwork.”
According to his lawyer, Francis’s involvement was minimal, at best.
In 2012 or 2013, after Gawker published a clip from the now-infamous video of Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife, Francis claims he convinced other sites to take down posts on the sex tape. “I worked the phones,” he says. “I called in every favor I possibly could.”
Houston tells the story differently: He had Francis call Richie because the two were friends and he wanted Francis to “facilitate an introduction” between himself and Richie so the latter would know Houston would be calling. Houston’s goal was to scrub his client’s sex tape from the internet. Richie confirms that Francis asked him to take down grainy stills from the tape, and two such posts were removed on May 8, 2013—shortly after Gawker refused a judge’s order to take down the video.
Francis rang other gossip rags too. “I sat on the phone for days, begging friends in the media: ‘Pull it fucking down.’ And calling off favors.” For whom? “TMZ, all these guys. I traded information too. Paid them off. Whatever I could do.”
Paid them off? A few days later, when asked to clarify that, Francis backtracked: Did he ask TMZ to take down the sex tape? “No comment.” Did any of these sites get paid off? “Nope.”
An email asking TMZ whether the site amended its coverage on Francis’s orders drew a hasty rebuke from a spokesperson: “No and you are completely off base.”
Houston says he contacted more than 80 sites after the sex tape broke. “All agreed to remove the offending content or not publish,” he says. Only Gawker declined.
Francis also gives himself credit for Hogan’s secret benefactor—peter Thiel—though there is scant evidence to support this narrative. Thiel, who made a fortune as the co-founder of Paypal, spent years plotting his revenge after he was outed by Gawker in 2007. In subsequent years, the blog mocked his business ventures and his rather bewildering comments on women’s suffrage. The Hogan suit provided Thiel with the opportunity he craved: He paid millions in legal fees to finance the lawsuit.
Francis says he had Houston threaten legal action against Gawker long before the Hogan lawsuit. Houston says he hadn’t even heard of Gawker before the suit was filed.
THE MEDIA RUIN GREAT THINGS
Joe Francis is famous for running his mouth, and swearwords pour out of it at a dazzling speed. After his 2013 conviction, he called the jurors “retarded” and said they “should be euthanized.” But during a brief, final phone conversation with Newsweek on August 31, he was uncharacteristically taciturn, and he declined to share emails he’d said would confirm his role in the Gawker case. “I don’t know.… I don’t want to ruin this thing,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt the judgment.” (He feared a court might use this information as a basis to overturn the ruling.)
“The media has a way of destroying great things sometimes,” he added.
The infomercial smut tycoon sounded hurried, saying he was on his way out with his wife and kids, but he offered to respond to some questions by email that night. He didn’t reply to that email. Nor a second one. Nor a third. And he stopped answering my phone calls.
His sudden reticence is perhaps understandable, even though Francis repeatedly compared his efforts against Gawker to the mission to take out the leader of Al-qaeda. “I killed Osama bin Laden,” he said. “Or I was the CIA operative who assisted in the killing of Osama bin Laden.”
Or, perhaps, he’s just somebody who has watched Zero Dark Thirty too many times.
“WE KILLED THE MOST RECKLESS, DANGEROUS SCUMBAG IN THE WORLD.”