Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press; Glow
THE GOSSIP WEBSITE Gawker was nasty, condescending, petty, trivial, too cool for school, annoyingly progressive, stunningly retrograde, obsessed with celebrity, contemptuous of celebrity, a tormentor of Fox News and The New York Times alike, too cynical, not real journalism, a waste of time and the reason they hate us, whoever they are.
I loved Gawker, and I read it every single day, usually more than once. The one time it made fun of me, I was thrilled, because if it hadn’t taken a predictably caustic note of your work, you were probably still some anonymous scribe for the Palookaville Daily Bugle. For those of us in the decreasingly glamorous business of journalism, Gawker was the bar right before last call, filled with every ambitious and angry writer in town.
A barstool heart-to-heart was, in fact, how Nick Denton, who founded Gawker in 2002, described the whole enterprise (which eventually included affiliate sites like Jezebel, Deadspin, Gizmodo and Lifehacker) in 2013. “The basic concept was two journalists in a bar telling each other a story that’s much more interesting than whatever hits the papers the next day,” he said.
The bar closed last year, when Gawker shut down and sold its remaining properties for scrap to Fusion. The short story has to do with Hulk Hogan’s penis. So does the long story, as it were. In 2013, the site published an excerpt from a video in which the professional wrestler, aka Terry Gene Bollea, is seen having sex with the wife of a friend. Bollea sued for invasion of privacy in a Florida court.
The Netflix documentary Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, written and directed by Brian Knappenberger, is the story of last spring’s trial. At issue was the tension between Hulk Hogan, public persona, and Hulk Hogan, private citizen. Lawyers for Bollea argued that publication of the sex tape infringed on his privacy and discounted the journalistic value of the tape. The jury agreed. It awarded Bollea $115 million in damages, and the judge added another $25 million for good measure. That bankrupted Gawker, leading to its demise.
Nobody Speak is the counterargument to that decision, for the most part treating the Gawker crew with unwavering sympathy, assuming perhaps too readily that viewers share a similar belief. It opens with A.J. Daulerio, the writer behind the offending post, discussing his bankruptcy. On his laptop, he shows a $230 million hold on his bank account, based on his own liability in the case.
“This is just something that I’m caught in the middle of,” Daulerio says. He’s caught, that’s for sure, but he was not a helpless bystander in the drama. Nor was the sex tape his first irresponsible, salacious post: irresponsible, salacious posts were his métier.
The martyrdom of Gawker is a compelling narrative, but misleading. It’s not that the site deserved to be destroyed. It just wasn’t the champion of journalistic freedoms the film makes it out to be. In fact, it did a lot of things a traditional outlet wouldn’t do, such as paying sources, publishing nudes
(of celebrities and noncelebrities) and engaging in ad hominem attacks. It wanted to have it both ways: old journalism respectability with new journalism freedoms. In the end, that proved impossible.
For Knappenberger, the villain of the story is Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who funded the Bollea suit as well as several others against the site, part of a long-standing grievance for having been outed as gay by a defunct Gawker property called Valleywag. Nobody Speak plainly makes the case that his pursuit of Gawker was unfair, motivated by an acute case of thin skin. But exactly what did Thiel do that was wrong? Certainly, it is not illegal to pay lawyers’ fees, which is all he did. It was a jury of ordinary Floridians that decided Gawker’s fate, not some cold-blooded Silicon Valley billionaire. The Gawker staffers interviewed in this case don’t seem to grasp that fact, striking a jarring note of self-righteousness.
Back when Gawker was being laid to rest, its editor, John Cook, mystifyingly compared its demise to parents losing a child in battle. He is a little less tone-deaf in Nobody Speak, but he remains inclined to see himself as a Woodward and Bernstein figure, not the man who once published a post titled “That U.S. Olympic Rower’s Cock Is Not Giant: A Photoanalysis.” In many ways, it was the site that Cook presided over that led to its demise, not the more successful version under earlier editors.
Thiel is a rara avis for several reasons, one of them being that he is a more or less openly gay, highly educated Silicon Valley entrepreneur who just happens to be a Donald Trump supporter. The film uses Thiel to pivot nimbly toward Trump and the right’s war on the free press, which began in earnest around the time the Gawker case was winding down.
Paradoxically, this documentary about Gawker is most successful when it leaves Gawker aside for more relevant cases of transgressions on freedom of the press, like the unceasing attacks against the Fourth Estate by Trump. Along with the need for a border wall, his conviction that the press is the “enemy of the people” may constitute the entirety of Trumpism. And since the wall is toxically unpopular with Congress, press hatred may be his sole guiding idea.
In the end, Gawker was undone by its own madcap brilliance, like the barroom raconteur who’s enthralling after two drinks, unbearable after four—especially near the end, when the site descended into embittered pomposity. In one of those ironic tricks time plays on us, it had become the very kind of bully it used to slay.
For all that, I miss Gawker terribly. It’s sad that it died right on the cusp of Trump’s presidency, that its final energy was expended on what seems, now, the relative calm of the Obama years. Gawker could be an irritant, but it could also be a truth-teller. The two are sometimes hard to separate.