Conspiracy Theories Around Lawsuits That Dog Gawker

It took Gawker Media founder Nick Denton some convincing, but he’s now among those curious if one financier is backing several legal attacks on the news site. Suspicion began during the lengthy defamation suit that Hulk Hogan brought against Gawker for publishing a portion of his sex tape, which ended in a $140 million jury award to the former wrestler. During that case, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes for The New York Times, Hogan made legal decisions that seemed unusual. And in recent weeks, several new lawsuits have been filed that are unrelated to Hogan’s case but appear to target certain Gawker writers personally. The common thread among the cases: Charles J. Harder, a Los Angeles litigator who brought all the suits and is working on a contingency basis. Denton has suspicions that Harder has a benefactor with deep pockets who is bankrolling the legal barrage. “My own personal hunch is that it’s linked to Silicon Valley, but that’s nothing really more than a hunch,” Denton said. “If you’re a billionaire and you don’t like the coverage of you, and you don’t particularly want to embroil yourself any further in public scandal, it’s a pretty smart, rational thing to fund other legal cases.”