Bled Dry

Peter Thiel's lawsuit killed Gawker. Private equity spent the next nine years selling off the rest. How the blogs that taught a generation to write got bled dry, and how The Despoiler is built so it can't happen here.

By Rich Vandall · Nov. 7, 2026

Opinion This is a column. It is the writer's view, not a news report.

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Billionaire gets outed. Billionaire holds a grudge. Billionaire buys a lawsuit and kills a website.

Then Wall Street spends nine years picking over the bones.

Salon went dark on Thursday. Thirty-one years. David Talbot, a former San Francisco Examiner editor, started it in November 1995, and it was one of the first real publications on the web. Jake Tapper, Steve Kornacki and Rebecca Traister all came through there. Its goodbye note said the business of independent digital journalism had changed and its model wasn't sustainable anymore. Nobody has said what happens to 31 years of archives.

I graduated in 2005 wanting to be a journalist. Life had other plans first. The whole time, I was reading the Gawker network. Jalopnik for cars. Deadspin for sports and the people who run sports. Jezebel for everything the polite outlets wouldn't touch. Gawker for the rich and powerful in New York and Silicon Valley.

Those sites wrote like people talk. They named names. They figured you could handle a joke and a fact in the same sentence. A lot of what you read in The Despoiler comes from that. So does a lot of why it exists at all.

Almost all of it is gone now, or scattered across owners in Malta, Switzerland and Atlanta.

Here's how. And who.

The Hit Job: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan and $10 Million in Revenge

Gawker didn't lose a fair fight. One of the richest men in Silicon Valley paid for a war for years, quietly, and put a wrestler out front.

The grudge. In 2007, Gawker's tech gossip blog Valleywag ran a post headlined "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook backer, wasn't out publicly yet. Two years later he called Valleywag the Silicon Valley equivalent of al Qaeda.

The vehicle. In 2012, Gawker posted a short clip from a secretly recorded sex tape of Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, with Heather Clem, the wife of his friend, Tampa radio host Bubba the Love Sponge. Hogan sued for invasion of privacy on his home turf, Pinellas County, Florida. His lead lawyer was Charles Harder.

Let's be honest. Posting that tape was an ugly call. Plenty of people who loved Gawker said so at the time. But an ugly call didn't kill the company.

Money did.

The verdict. March 2016. A St. Petersburg jury gave Hogan $115 million, then tacked on $25 million in punitive damages. That's $140 million, many times what Gawker Media was worth on its best day. Founder Nick Denton got hit personally too.

The reveal. Two months later, Forbes reported that Thiel had been secretly paying for Hogan's case. Thiel confirmed it to The New York Times. About $10 million. He also said he'd had lawyers out looking for other people Gawker had written about who might sue. He called it "less about revenge and more about specific deterrence."

Deterrence of what? A news outlet writing things a billionaire doesn't like. And who else was supposed to get that message?

Look at how the case was built. Hogan's side dropped a negligence claim, the one claim that would have brought Gawker's insurance company in to pay. So any payout had to come straight out of Gawker's own pocket. Why would a plaintiff wave off an insurance company's money? Unless the money was never the point. Thiel didn't need to win on every count. He just needed the fight to cost more than Gawker could ever pay.

The kill. June 2016, Gawker Media files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Denton files for personal bankruptcy. That August, Univision wins the auction for the other six sites (Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Jezebel, Kotaku and Jalopnik) for $135 million. It didn't want Gawker.com. The last Gawker post went up Aug. 22, 2016.

The settlement. In November 2016, what was left of Gawker settled with Hogan for $31 million and gave up its appeal. Denton said he was confident an appeals court would have cut or thrown out the Florida judgment. But an all-out war with Thiel, he said, would cost too much and hurt too many people. Two other Thiel-backed plaintiffs got about $1.25 million between them: Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims he invented email, and Ashley Terrill, who sued over a story about Tinder.

Here's the part that should turn every reporter's stomach. The deal pulled three true stories off the internet. Univision had already deleted posts tied to the lawsuits from the sites it bought. Thiel called it a great day for everyone's right to privacy.

The playbook. It's legal for someone to quietly pay for someone else's lawsuit. That's the problem. Thiel showed every billionaire in America how to kill a publication without putting his name on a single filing. Find a sympathetic plaintiff. Pick a friendly courtroom. Keep the meter running until the target runs dry.

The Gawker name never came back. Bustle Digital Group bought Gawker.com and its archive out of bankruptcy in 2018 for about $1.35 million, relaunched it in July 2021 and shut it down again on Feb. 1, 2023. Barely 18 months.

Hulk Hogan died in July 2025. He was 71. Most of his obituaries had to give the Gawker case its own paragraph.

Thiel is still here. Richer than ever, and now one of the most powerful men in American politics.

The Flip: From Bankruptcy Auction to Private Equity

Thiel killed Gawker.com. Finance finished off the family. In under three years, the surviving sites went from a bankruptcy auction to a TV conglomerate to a private equity firm, and every owner paid less than the last one.

Univision, 2016 to 2019. Univision rolled the six sites into something it called Gizmodo Media Group, partly to get the Gawker name off them. It was supposed to be the Spanish-language giant's big play for young English-speaking readers, through a bundle called Fusion Media Group. What it got was layoffs and a scrapped stock offering. The sites brought in more than $80 million in 2017 and still lost about $20 million. In July 2018, Univision put them up for sale.

Great Hill Partners, April 2019. The buyer was Great Hill Partners, a Boston private equity firm. It bought Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion together and named the new company G/O Media. The price was reported at under $50 million. About a third of what Univision paid three years earlier. The man in charge was Jim Spanfeller, a former Forbes.com executive who also put his own money into the deal.

That's the private equity math. Buy cheap. Squeeze costs. Juice the short-term numbers. Sell the pieces for more than you paid.

Who's in that math? Not the writers. Not the readers.

The squeeze. Spanfeller told Variety the company didn't plan to cut its way to growth. Weeks later, G/O laid off 25 people, top editors included. Staff fought management over autoplay video ads that took over the page. In October 2021, G/O stripped every image from every story published before 2019 across 11 sites. A decade of archives left looking like a burned-out building.

The robots. In July 2023, G/O started what it called a "modest test" of AI-written articles on Gizmodo, Deadspin, The A.V. Club and others. Nobody told the editors whose names were on those sites. The first one, a Star Wars timeline on io9, was full of errors. The writers' union called bot-written journalism an oxymoron. That September, G/O laid off the Gizmodo en Español staff and replaced their work with machine translations of English stories.

I use AI tools to run The Despoiler, so let me be clear about the difference. One person using a tool to do the work of a newsroom that doesn't exist yet is one thing. Using it to replace the newsroom you already have, so the margins look better for the next buyer, is another.

Same tool. Different owner. Different intent.

Stick to Sports: How the Family Got Sold for Parts

Deadspin broke first, and it broke loud. In six years, private equity took a family of sites that pulled 100 million visitors a month and scattered it across at least seven owners.

Deadspin, 2019. By August 2019, editor in chief Megan Greenwell had quit. She said G/O leadership wouldn't guarantee editorial independence and wanted the site to "stick to sports." Deadspin had always covered sports and the powerful people around it. Owners. Leagues. Media. Politics. Writers said the non-sports work pulled more than twice the traffic.

On Oct. 28, 2019, management put the stick-to-sports order in writing. The staff answered by publishing everything but sports and tagging each post with the phrase. Management pulled posts off the homepage. Interim editor Barry Petchesky got fired for refusing to go along. Over the next few days, nearly 20 writers and editors walked out. One of them said publicly she believed the whole point was to make Deadspin a clean asset to pitch to the next buyer.

The G/O version of Deadspin that relaunched in 2020 reportedly drew about a tenth of its old readers.

The rest of the dominoes.

Jezebel's long goodbye. About three-quarters of Jezebel's staff left in 2021 alone. Its interim editor in chief quit in August 2023 and said G/O had failed to treat her staff with basic decency. When G/O shut the site that November over "economic headwinds," the writers' union blamed management's strategic and commercial ineptitude. Paste bought it at the end of the month. In November 2025, Paste folded Splinter into Jezebel as a section.

Kotaku and the end. By the time Keleops bought Kotaku in July 2025, layoffs had cut the gaming site to six full-time editorial staffers. That left G/O with one site, The Root, and it wanted that gone too. Spanfeller wrote an "epilogue" on the company blog. He admitted Deadspin could be seen as the poster child for G/O's fights over editorial independence. He also made sure to say the company sold Deadspin for more than it paid.

That's the tell. Success was never measured in journalism, readers or people.

It was the exit price.

The Wider Wreck: Valuations Up, Newsrooms Down

The Gawker family wasn't the only casualty. A whole class of 2010s digital media got pumped up by investors chasing a payday, then dumped when the payday didn't come.

From 2014 to 2017 alone, investors put about $2 billion into BuzzFeed, Vox Media and Vice. A few years later, sites like them were selling for a fraction of that, or shutting down.

Vice. In 2017, private equity giant TPG put $450 million into Vice at a $5.7 billion valuation. Disney had already put in a reported $400 million. In May 2023, Vice filed for Chapter 11 owing about $1 billion, roughly $475 million of it to its biggest secured lender, Fortress. A group led by Fortress and Soros Fund Management bid $225 million for the whole company. About 4% of what it was supposedly worth at the peak. The month before, Vice had killed its nightly TV newscast and laid off more than 100 people.

BuzzFeed News. In April 2023, BuzzFeed shut down BuzzFeed News to cut costs. Two years earlier, that newsroom won a Pulitzer Prize.

The company kept the quizzes.

The pattern. Venture and private equity money doesn't fund journalism. It funds growth curves. When the curve flattens, what gets cut first? The newsroom. Reporters cost money, and their work doesn't show up on a quarterly slide. These sites chased whatever Facebook and Google rewarded that year. They hired and fired on the algorithm's mood. They never owned the relationship with their readers. So when the platforms changed the rules, what was left underneath?

Nothing.

The playbook spreads. Thiel's method didn't stay with Thiel. The same lawyer, Charles Harder, later represented Shiva Ayyadurai, the self-described inventor of email, in a $15 million suit against Techdirt, a small tech blog. A federal judge threw it out. Techdirt still had to pay to defend itself. The lesson rich people took from Thiel is simple. You don't have to win a lawsuit against a small outlet. You just have to make it too expensive to keep fighting.

Closer to home. For years, Ohio had no anti-SLAPP law at all. A small Ohio outlet hit with a junk suit had to grind through discovery and pay lawyers the whole way. That changed when Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 237 on Jan. 8, 2025, making Ohio the 35th state with anti-SLAPP protection. The law took effect April 9, 2025. It lets a defendant ask a judge to toss a suit over speech on a matter of public concern early. It pauses discovery while that gets decided, gives an immediate right to appeal and can make the plaintiff cover the defendant's legal fees. It won't stop a billionaire from bankrolling a plaintiff in Florida. But a Dayton outlet can't be bled dry here as cheap as Gawker was there.

Where the Voice Went

The voice didn't die. It walked out the door, took the keys back from the money people and started over. The most hopeful thing in American media right now is that the writers pushed out of these sites are doing better owning their own work than they ever did working for investors.

Defector. The Deadspin staff who quit in 2019 came back in September 2020 with Defector, a company they own themselves. No outside investors. More than 10,000 people subscribed the day it was announced. In its fifth year, September 2024 to August 2025, it brought in about $4.65 million, roughly $3.8 million of it straight from readers.

The rest of them. Former Vice Motherboard reporters started 404 Media in 2023, and they own it too. Former Kotaku writers who left G/O started Aftermath. In New York, Hell Gate covers the city the same way, owned by the people who write it. None of them answer to a billionaire. None of them have a private equity firm waiting to flip them.

The lesson. Every site I grew up reading died the same way. Somebody with a lot of money decided the journalism was worth less than what they could squeeze out of it. Thiel wanted Gawker dead and paid to make it happen. Private equity wanted an exit and took it, one piece at a time.

The writers, the readers and the work were never part of the math.

How The Despoiler Is Built to Stay Free

I built The Despoiler on one rule. Nobody with money gets a say in what it prints. Every choice since day one, from who owns it to where the website lives, comes back to that.

Peter Thiel's money is not welcome here. Neither is anybody else's who'd expect something for it.

One owner, nothing to flip. The Despoiler is published by thedespoiler LLC, an Ohio company I formed in February 2025 and own outright. No investors. No board. No shareholders. The Gawker sites got sold three times because somebody always owned a piece and wanted out. Nobody owns a piece of this. There's nothing to sell to a Great Hill or a Lineup Publishing.

A day job, not a runway. I work a full-time job that has nothing to do with The Despoiler. That paycheck covers my life, so The Despoiler never has to take a bad deal to make rent. G/O needed buyers because it had debt and a payroll to feed. The Despoiler has no payroll.

Costs kept close to zero. The site is a static website on a free host. No expensive servers. The newsroom is me, the AI tools I pay for like any other customer, and whatever publishing partners I bring in down the road. When it costs almost nothing to run, it can live on what readers and neighbors give it. An outlet that can afford to say no can't be bought.

Paid for by Dayton. The Despoiler runs on reader support and local sponsors. There's no paywall, because the news shouldn't belong only to people who can pay for it. The "Made in Dayton, spent in Dayton" page lists reputable local businesses so the money stays here. Sponsors buy space, classifieds and small ads, clearly marked. They don't buy stories. They don't see stories before you do.

Open books. The Despoiler has its own business bank account, separate from mine, and every expense gets logged with a receipt, down to the AI subscriptions. Want to know who pays for The Despoiler? Ask. I'll show you.

Pointed at the money, not paid by it. The Despoiler tracks private equity, hedge funds, prediction markets, Ohio white-collar crime, campaign spending and the ways rich and powerful people get around the rules. That only works if The Despoiler doesn't owe any of them a thing. So the line is simple. No money from billionaires, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds or anyone we cover.

Built for readers, not an exit. Every story credits and links its sources. The trackers are public, no login, and they publish every week whether the numbers move or not. Nothing here is built to look good to a future buyer.

There isn't going to be one.

Gawker, Jezebel, Jalopnik and Deadspin taught me you can tell the truth about powerful people and still sound like a human being. The people who killed them taught me the other half.

Own your own press. Or someday somebody else decides what it prints.

AI tools gathered and sorted the research for this column and checked the math. The opinions are Rich Vandall's. How we report.