At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing

All four had worked at the groundbreaking digital blog Gawker in its final years and experienced, as Jefferson put it, the “roller coaster of high highs and low lows” that came with the job, as well as the controversy and criticism that dogged the site because of its no-holds-barred reporting and essays. During its run from 2002 to 2016, Gawker regularly exposed the hubris, hypocrisy and misdeeds of the famous, wealthy and powerful. That those stories were often steeped in snark only added to the fury they sparked.

Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season.

Scraper was not a hagiography. Carmichael, who became Gawker’s managing editor in her early 20s, describes the show as “Industry meets Succession,” with characters based on the characters who worked there. “We were telling the story honestly,” says Jefferson. “It was a morally queasy place, and that makes for interesting television.”

Jefferson and Read say they went into the deal knowing that there was no love lost between Apple and Gawker, the website co-founded by British journalist, blogger and entrepreneur Nick Denton that published a series of blogs in addition to its flagship. In 2010, one of those blogs, Gizmodo, which covered the tech industry, infuriated Steve Jobs when it obtained and published photos of an iPhone 4 prototype that an engineer had left in a restaurant. The next year, another Gawker-owned site, Valleywag, outed Tim Cook in a story headlined, “Meet Tim Cook, the Most Powerful Gay Man in Silicon Valley.”

“Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.”

But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.”

Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read, Carmichael and Beckmann) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)

In August, when Jefferson — who was nominated that July for the Emmy he won for his writing on the HBO miniseries Watchmen — informed the writers room of Scraper‘s fate, Carmichael says, “I wish I had a screenshot because the playwrights and Hollywood people were, jaws on the floor, gasping, ‘What?’ And all the Gawker people were like, ‘This happens all the time.’ “

Of course, Cook was not the first tech titan to exact revenge on Gawker. In 2016, pro wrestler Hulk Hogan — birth name, Terry Bollea — won an invasion of privacy lawsuit over A.J. Daulerio’s 2012 posting of a 90-second snippet of a sex tape depicting the grappler and the estranged wife of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. The jury’s decision to award $140 million in damages to Hogan — later reduced to a $31 million settlement — forced Gawker Media to file for bankruptcy. Its flagship site went dark, and other sites, including Gizmodo, Deadspin and Jezebel, were auctioned off to the Spanish-language media company Univision.

After the verdict, the entrepreneur and tech lord Peter Thiel — whom Valleywag had outed in 2007 — emerged from the shadows to tell The New York Times that he had spent roughly $10 million secretly bankrolling Hogan’s suit, deeming it “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done.”

Gawker, which shut down 10 years ago this August, was guilty of lapses in judgment — former staffers interviewed for this story admit as much. It could be withering, puerile and gratuitously nasty. But, at its best, it rebelled against media piety and the growing, often indiscriminate power of the digital world and the hubristic entrepreneurs who were shaping it. As print and television media fumbled their way online, Gawker used the internet to pull back the curtain on celebrity, mainstream media, politics and creeping commercialism.

It also, Jefferson says, “played a large part in disseminating what would eventually become the default voice of the internet: sarcasm, skepticism, urbanity, Black/queer slang, message board slang, exclamation points, etc.” In the process, he adds, “It fostered some of the most vibrant voices in journalism.”

“Gawker was bleeding edge in every way,” says Jessica Coen, Gawker’s editor-in-chief from 2004 to 2006. “From professionalization and monetization of blogging, to scaling, to the introduction of renegade journalism on the web — the idea of moving fast, asking questions later and writing with voice. These all became media norms, but Gawker took the lead.

“And then you’ve got the most tragic bleeding edge of all,” Coen continues. “Which is, it was put out of business by a billionaire with an ax to grind.”

A decade after its demise, THR tracked down the writers and editors who were at the center of Gawker’s storm — from its most euphoric scoops and wildest parties to its grim and foreshadowing end — to understand how Gawker shaped their lives and more importantly, ours.

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Elizabeth Spiers explains she launched Gawker.com with Denton in late 2002 after they bonded over their mutual love of the British satire magazine Private Eye (which also inspired Spy magazine’s founders). “There was no institutional voice at that point; it was just me being a snarky smartass because I am a snarky smartass.”

Spiers worked from home, where “I was essentially blogging around the clock — doing, like, 12 posts a day, seven days a week,” she says. After a few months, the 24/7 pace took its toll. “I was burned out, and I told Nick I wanted to cut back to just weekdays,” she says. “Nick being Nick said, ‘OK, but I’m going to pay you less.’ He had been paying me $1,800 a month, and he cut it to $1,200,” she adds. In 2003, she left for New York magazine. “Ninety percent of the reason I left was I needed to pay the bills, and I didn’t have enough time after writing Gawker to freelance on top of it.”

Denton eventually established a proper office for Gawker’s staff, a storefront across from his Crosby Street apartment in Soho. “He wanted people seeing us do our thing, which was profoundly boring,” Coen says. “A bunch of kids on their laptops on AOL Messenger with each other even though they’re literally sitting next to each other.”

The staff expanded, but the grueling pace did not let up. Denton pushed his staff to drive more traffic. “Nick was relentless,” says Coen. “I would get messages at all hours.” Gawker’s staff included many gay men like Denton himself, and as one former editor put it, “young women about town.” Jefferson — who says he had a good relationship with the boss — recalls that Denton could be “mean and insulting, and a lot of women I worked with at Gawker had issues with the way he managed women.” Denton declined to comment.

Denton hired and fired his editors-in-chief at a fast clip, too, changing the top of the masthead 14 times.

“Nick’s brain was constantly toggling between two goals for Gawker,” says Read, who started at the blog in 2010 and became its top editor in 2014. “What he wanted to be at the same time was, one, a traffic juggernaut” — to facilitate that, he installed a screen in the New York office that showed the site’s top traffic-driving stories and paid bonuses based on the numbers — and, Read adds, he wanted it be “a smart, meme blog that impressed the people he wanted to impress.” As Denton ping-ponged between these often opposing missions, Read says, “Literally every single year I worked there after 2011, whoever was my immediate supervisor left.”

Despite this revolving door of leadership, Gawker staffers say they were remarkably free to develop their own stories and writing voices. “It was very entrepreneurial. It allowed you to just go do what you want to do,” says Jefferson. “It’s a terrifying first day on the job because somebody just gives you a computer and says, ‘Go write. We hired you for your voice and your brain, so just produce.’

“There was one principle that everybody seemed to follow, which was if it’s true, we publish it. You weren’t supposed to go in thinking about whose feelings might be hurt,” says Jefferson. Denton did not consider himself exempt from that kind of truth-telling. In a 2016 Medium essay about the demise of Gawker, Denton wrote that his “friendship with [former NBC News anchor] Brian Williams went cold after Gawker published a private email I had forwarded as a tip, in a demonstration by Gawker’s editor that even the publisher was fair game.”

For a crew of young, idealistic, filter-free reporters and editors seeking to make their mark on journalism, Gawker’s office culture could be heady. “I really can’t overstate how powerful that us-versus-the-world mentality was,” says Beckmann, who worked at Gawker on and off from 2010 to 2015, her last role as deputy editor. Gawker and its sister sites broke stories that later became big news. John Cook and Nick Bryant were the first to publish the pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book in 2015 and in a companion piece revealed flight logs for his private Boeing 727. (Fun fact: After Thiel revealed he was behind the Hogan lawsuit, Epstein emailed him, writing, “I would have gladly share [sic] your expenses for the gawker suit.”)

Cook, who worked at Gawker Media periodically from 2010-16 and was the flagship site’s editor-in-chief for slightly more than a year, eventually took his skills to Business Insider, where he oversaw a 2022 piece about Elon Musk’s SpaceX paying $250,000 to silence a flight attendant at the company who claimed the billionaire exposed himself and asked for sex. And in 2024, he landed at The Wall Street Journal, where he is deputy editor of an investigative team that helped lead the paper to a Pulitzer Prize win last year.

Gawker was rooted as much in irreverence and humor as news. Caity Weaver’s tick-tock account of testing the TGIF restaurant chain’s Endless Appetizers promotion by choking down seven plates of mozzarella sticks in 14 hours is considered a classic: “I ask [my waiter] Gabby if she’s had the mozzarella sticks, and what does she think of them? She tells me, ‘They’re good.’ Gabby and I are not yet good enough friends that we can be honest with one another.” Weaver’s work at Gawker led to a job as a staff writer for GQ and then The New York Times. She joined The Atlantic as a staff writer in 2025, and the Gawker sensibility that informed her TGIF story shines through her April piece for the publication, “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.”

Even Gawker’s star investigative reporter Adrian Chen, whose exposé of the dark web marketplace Silk Road was a huge scoop, could generate laughs. Chen tracked down the origins of a grotesque viral shock photo dubbed “Goatse” as well as the identity of its star, who, as Chen wrote, is depicted, bent over and back to the camera lens, “stretching his asshole to the diameter of a cantaloupe.” After leaving Gawker, Chen wrote for The New Yorker from 2016 to 2018 and has since freelanced for Wired and the Times. He did not respond to a request for comment, but former colleagues say he’s working on a long-gestating book.

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By 2014, when Read became editor-in-chief, he recalls Gawker was doing 15 million to 20 million page views a month, with an occasional story hitting 3 million. That same year, Denton married actor Derrence Washington at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The Times covered it, and Read says, “Nick was really feeling himself and feeling Gawker as this growing power.”

By then, the mainstream media was paying close attention to Gawker with a mix of fascination over its scoops and chatty, compelling voices, and condescension because its journalistic standards were not as strict as theirs. Denton asserted in a 2016 Medium essay that journalists were “obsessed” with Gawker because it was “calling out the absurdities of the industry,” adding, “Never underestimate the power of narcissism.”

“There was a big love/hate relationship with the rest of media,” says Jefferson, but “come the Gawker holiday party, you should have seen how many people who didn’t work at Gawker came to drink Gawker’s alcohol and take the Gawker gossip.”

Despite — or because of — Gawker’s growth, and probably because Denton and general counsel Heather Dietrick were already dealing with Hogan’s lawsuit and others Thiel was behind, Read says he noticed the powers that be exhibiting a new behavior: caution.

In July 2015, a Gawker piece alleged that married Condé Nast CFO David Geithner, brother of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, had sought the escort services of a male porn star. In retrospect, Read says the decision to publish the story was rushed. That night, Denton was throwing a party, and “there was a sense of, ‘Let’s show up at Nick’s with this scoop.’ ” The reaction was far from what he expected. A firestorm of disapproval erupted on Twitter — and Read proceeded to make it worse. “I’d had a few drinks — again, so many things I would do differently — and I tweeted something like, ‘Gawker will always report on the sex lives of C-suite media executives,’ which was true. But nobody wanted to hear that.”

Gawker took down the story. The staff, which had voted to unionize weeks earlier, protested, and Read and Gawker Media executive editor Tommy Craggs quit. “I had to quit because advertising had overruled editorial, but it also was a blessing in disguise,” Read says, “because I was able to eat the sin for my writers and feel like I maintained my integrity.”

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The Hulk Hogan sex-tape story went up shortly after Jefferson arrived at Gawker, and he says, “If you would have told me that would be the story that would bring down the entire thing, I would have never believed you.”

There were other stories that bothered him more, like a post by a writer who recounted a chaste one-night stand with Tea Party activist and Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell that described her pubic hair.

“Gawker eventually became like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, where it didn’t understand its own power,” Jefferson says. “It started out as this little blog published out of Nick Denton’s living room. Everything he was doing was punching up because nobody had ever heard of it or him. By the time I got there, it was a powerful entity that could rattle and affect lives. But people continued to write as if they were still in a living room when they should have started thinking, ‘The story’s true, but is it a story we should be sharing?’ “

The Florida jury that heard arguments in the Hogan sex-tape lawsuit decided the answer to that question was no, though it should be pointed out that the case was won on an invasion of privacy claim, not libel or defamation. Indeed, in 2024, Thiel told Ann Coulter on her Unsafe podcast that when deciding which lawsuits to bring against Gawker, “We tried to bring cases that did not involve libel. Ever. Because we didn’t want the media to circle the wagons on Gawker.”

That did not happen. Craggs, who since leaving Gawker founded the Oakland Review of Books, says, “I remember this incredibly naive moment where I was like, ‘Journalists will be on our side. They love congratulating themselves for supporting even the worst actors in First Amendment cases, like Larry Flynt.’ And what a dumb fantasy that was.”

Some of the fallout was payback. In the 2016 story he wrote for Medium, Denton recounted that on the day Gawker filed for bankruptcy, then-New York Post editor Col Allan, who had been deemed a “pig fucker” by the site after the tabloid misidentified two men as suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, emailed Gawker’s tip line with the screed, “Squeal, pig fuckers, squeal.”

The decision also foretold a cultural and political shift, which then executive editor Lacey Donohue — now a senior vp at Hulu — recognized immediately. A group of Gawker staffers were watching a livestream of the Hogan trial when the verdict was announced. According to an editor who was present, “The first words out of Lacey’s mouth were, ‘Trump’s going to win.’ “

Beckmann says, “The early rumblings of Peter Thiel backing that lawsuit made me almost a conspiracy theorist. I was like, ‘There is no way this is true. This is what a crazy person would believe.’ It really shifted the way that I look at those kinds of stories.”

“People in the media who got a kick out of Gawker dying should feel ashamed today,” Jefferson says. “You can draw a direct line between Peter Thiel funding a lawsuit to shut down Gawker and Donald Trump suing all of these news outlets. Billionaires own The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and Twitter,” he adds. “We have allowed billionaires, many of whom are also right wing, to control the means by which information is conveyed to the populace. That is a very scary thing, and it has a direct connection to Peter Thiel and Gawker.”

In April, news arrived that Aron D’Souza, the lawyer that spearheaded the strategy that used Hogan as a proxy to take down Gawker, launched a startup called Objection.ai that, according to D’Souza, will allow anyone who can afford the $2,000 to $10,000 fee to have specific media claims tested for veracity via an AI tribunal. Thiel is one of its principal backers.

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Insular and Clubby Hollywood may seem an unlikely place for Gawker expats to land, but Jefferson — who says that writing for television and film was not on his agenda when he began working for the blog — has thrived there. A 2013 satirical essay about “white lawlessness” inspired by a riot following a Huntington Beach surfing competition captured the attention of 3 Arts’ Johnson, who signed him as a client. His writing on race at Gawker would later come to inform his 2023 Oscar-winning script for American Fiction, adapted from the Percival Everett novel Erasure. He is now directing Netflix’s series adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, with Franzen writing the scripts and Meryl Streep set to star.

Carmichael, Gawker’s managing editor from 2012 to 2014 and boss of its sister site Jezebel until 2017, also landed in Hollywood, first on the HBO satirical news program Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas. “It seemed like a pretty good exit plan,” she says. The opportunity to join the writing team for Scraper arrived next, and Carmichael now has projects at 20th Century Studios and Hulu. She is also working on her first book, an oral history of the WNBA.

Beckmann, who worked on and off at Gawker from 2010 to 2015, starting as an intern and leaving as deputy editor, wrote for the Peacock musical-comedy series Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin and the NBC sitcom Champions. Currently, she’s in the writers room for Nick Kroll’s upcoming Netflix comedy series, One Hundred Percent, a satiric take on the manosphere. Her path to comedy writing began when she was “trapped in a cubicle at some horrible copywriting job, reading Gawker every day and just completely obsessed. It was the funniest place on the internet.”

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Since departing Gawker, Spiers has worked for a slew of media brands, including New York magazine, Fortune, Fast Company and the New York Post‘s Page Six. She briefly served as the editor-in-chief of Jared Kushner’s New York Observer and now is a contract writer for the Times. An essay she wrote for The Nation following Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s September murder read like vintage unapologetic Gawker. Kirk, Spiers wrote, “was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct.”

Coen says she walked out of Gawker “finding nothing whatsoever intimidating about this town — not because I thought I was hot shit, but because I knew what was going on behind the scenes and knew how it all worked.” Those insights led to jobs as the deputy online editor for Vanity Fair and subsequently, New York magazine. She is now editor-in-chief at the social media-first site The Recount, which focuses on political news.

Other former Gawker editors who continue to shape the web include Choire Sicha, who Jefferson asserts “was the stylist most responsible for forging the Gawker voice, if ever one existed. Every millennial sprinkling their texts with ‘LOL!’ as punctuation owes him a debt.” Sicha, who also made stops at the Observer, the Times and Vox Media, is CNN’s senior vp features. His deputy is former Gawker editor Tom Scocca. Both declined to speak for this story.

The Gawker editor who has arguably generated the most press since the Hogan trial is former EIC Daulerio — and not because he wanted it. His sarcastic comment in a deposition that he wouldn’t consider a celebrity sex tape newsworthy if it involved a child under 4 years old made headlines and became a shiv for Gawker’s enemies.

Daulerio, who left Gawker at the beginning of 2013 and entered rehab, says that 13 years later, he’s gotten past the stress of having his cellphones and computers confiscated and can laugh at the memory of logging in to his bank account and seeing a negative amount in excess of $230 million (even though the damages determined by the jury were $140 million). He was held personally liable for the damages because Gawker Media and Denton had filed for bankruptcy protection. His lawyer later convinced Gawker to roll up his debt into its $31 million settlement. He points out that the verdict was announced on his birthday.

“Gawker made me understand the power of having someone say, ‘No comment,’ ” Daulerio says. “They were the two most powerful words that I could run with there. I know what’s behind that ‘No comment.’ I know there’s a scramble. I know there’s discomfort.”

But, he says, “I no longer look at the world through the Gawker lens.” In 2020, he started a newsletter and website called The Small Bow, about addiction and recovery based on his experiences following his 2013 departure from the blog. The project has evolved into a video podcast and book projects. He also is writing his memoir. Asked how big his audience is, he says, “No one, but it’s being well-funded” by AND Media.

As for Gawker’s patriarch, Denton and his husband have moved to Budapest, where he runs a private “timeline generation” company that uses AI to predict future valuations of companies. After a long period of radio silence, he resurfaced in April 2025, posting more than 200 times on X and sitting for some interviews. In a Q&A with Vanity Fair — ostensibly to generate interest in selling his Soho apartment — he claimed, “The story that Peter Thiel really didn’t like” — not the piece that outed him, which was quite complimentary and written by a gay man — was another story that poked holes in the “Paypal official story of endless success.” He had made a similar argument in the Medium piece, writing that Valleywag “complicated Thiel’s business ventures” and increasingly portrayed him as a “crackpot libertarian.”

Thiel, Denton also said, “did me a huge favor” by forcing the sale of Gawker Media, an assertion that certainly raises eyebrows. “It provided a pretext to close Gawker down, which I needed to do anyway. And I sold the [rest of the] business for $135 million.” He added of the Jezebel, Deadspin, etc., auction, “The fact is, that was probably the peak of valuation for the digital media companies around then.”

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Read says that three or four years ago, he “got recruited to do a podcast for Condé Nast. I recorded a test episode, and they wanted to make me an offer. At some point, I brought up the fact that I worked at Gawker and had been involved with the Geithner story.” After a week of radio silence, he says, “I got this apologetic call from the head of podcasts, ‘Actually we’re not going to offer you this.’ “

Read, who says he now makes more than he did at Gawker with his Substack column, Read Max, adds, “Clearly, grudges are still held, but for the most part, Gawker’s legacy is more positive than that. There’s an enormous amount of talent and skill that got built out of Gawker.”

Most staffers agree that no successor to Gawker exists today and probably couldn’t given today’s cowed media landscape. Bustle Digital Group resurrected Gawker in 2021 but suspended publication in 2023 and sold the name and domain to Meng Ru Kuok, CEO of Singapore-based Caldecott Music Group. But Daulerio says its DNA can still be found, for example, “on Max’s Substack, wherever John Cook lands, and in Caity Weaver’s work.” Others agree that New York magazine’s online sites — where Emily Gould’s writing can be found — do a decent job of channeling Gawker’s blogginess.

A number of the former staffers do stay in touch. “I play Wordle with Tom Scocca, Lacey Donohue, Jim Cook and Adam Pash every morning, and Tommy [Craggs]’s done some work for Small Bow,” Daulerio says.

“Gawker is where I met my people, and they’re people that I have gotten to work with again and again over the years on different projects,” says Carmichael. “There’s that ‘one of us’ feeling when you come across someone in the wild who shares that sensibility, and it has been really meaningful for me and my work.”

“Not all of us keep in touch, but there is an unspoken bond there and mutual respect,” says Coen. “Because no one can understand what it was like to work at Gawker — unless they worked at Gawker.”

This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.