Nikki Finke was a journalistic terrorist

Everyone in Hollywood who was active during Finke’s reign—and it was a reign; she dominated the landscape from 2006 to 2013 in a way that is difficult to explain to those who didn’t experience it—has a Nikki story, and most of them are awful. She was awful. Screaming threats. 3 a.m. phone calls. Outright blackmail. I’m all for being super-aggressive on a story—but she’d try to destroy lives, to get agents and assistants fired if they wouldn’t do her bidding. She’d torment publicists with email subject lines like “today’s the day I ruin your career.” She once attempted to sabotage the book deal of a rival journalist I know, just because. She’d have her lawyer send frivolous and harassing letters, and in 2011 she convinced Penske to sue THR for $5 million over some website code we mistakenly used from a Penske site. (It settled.) Nobody does anything in Hollywood unless they’re afraid, she once told me. There’s an element of truth to that, and good journalists know how to exploit that fear, but Nikki took it to a destructive and selfish end.

We all loved to read when she went after someone, but Nikki once told me in blunt terms that she occasionally wrote horrible things she knew to be untrue about people in order to get them to play ball with her in the future. That’s pretty much the definition of libel, but to her it was just a casual Hollywood power play—a way for her to exert control over people with more power than her. And to control the next story, and the one after that. Most journalists, even those with a pointed voice and a perspective (myself included), wouldn’t write anything that they wouldn’t say to someone’s face. But Nikki sidestepped those ethics by being unseen by anyone. …

None of that changes the fact that Nikki was a terrorist. A journalistic terrorist, sure, yet a terrorist nonetheless. She presented herself as a no-bullshit reporter who kept the Hollywood moguls honest, yet she perverted the profession by blackmailing sources, often targeting the weak, and weaponizing the internet to push her bile directly into our inboxes. Outsiders could never really see Nikki for what she was because they found her copy so irresistible.