Devotion to the 1st Amendment should also provoke grave concerns about Thiel’s open-checkbook funding of Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. What Thiel did wasn’t illegal; he has free-speech rights too. The problem is that Thiel found a way to weaponize the brokenness of our legal system.
Though Thiel crushed Gawker through victory, he might well have crushed it in defeat. Defending a civil suit, whatever its merits, is often a years-long pitched battle. Eventual vindication rarely comes with reimbursement of fees and costs, let alone compensation for the disruption and stress. Most victories are Pyrrhic. Few factors deter vengeance by litigation; one is that litigation is impossibly expensive, even for plaintiffs. A billionaire’s support eliminates that barrier and allows angry people to silence speakers they hate.
That doesn’t mean we should stop the rich from funding causes they care about. It means that the cause of free speech requires us constantly to reevaluate our legal system and demand that the process of litigation itself cannot prove ruinous. Again, that’s true even when hated gossip-mongers are at the receiving end of that litigation. We owe this vigilance to ourselves — as the potential next targets — and to our free-speech heritage.
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