Revealed: the Aussie law graduate who helped tech billionaire take down Gawker

Australian law graduate Aron D’Souza was instrumental in helping to bring down the US gossip site.

Law graduate Aron D’Souza, who hatched the plan to take down a gossip media empire. Picture: Julian Kingma

It reads like the list of characters for what might be the next Avengers movie.

Wrestling legend Hulk Hogan. Silicon Valley’s most powerful man, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Donald Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder. And … a little-known 26-year-old law graduate from Melbourne.

Aron D’Souza, 33, until now known only as “Mr A”, conspired with the colourful list of characters to bring down gossip media empire Gawker. Speaking on the rec­ord for the first time, Mr D’Souza tells The Weekend Australian of how he went from sleeping on his friend’s couch to orchestrating in secret a plan that would ultimately result in a jury awarding Hogan $US140 million.

Hulk Hogan, whose case was pivotal to the plan.

It’s a story that has all the makings of a Hollywood script — and one is in the works.

For five years, Mr D’Souza worked in the shadows, co-­ordinating a team of lawyers working on behalf of Mr Thiel — the co-founder of PayPal and Facebook’s first investor, who had long held a grudge against Gawker for outing him as gay in a 2007 blog post. Mr Thiel wanted to destroy Gawker and Mr D’Souza had just the way to do it.

The Melbourne man’s grand plan was to secretly fund someone else’s lawsuit — someone who had a stronger case against Gawker than Mr Thiel did — and Hogan was the perfect candidate. Gawker had posted a lurid sex tape of Hogan being intimate with his best friend’s wife, and it had been filmed without the wrestler’s consent. Mr Thiel and Mr D’Souza had found their case. “It was this extremely tough thing to do, I couldn’t tell my family, I couldn’t tell my boyfriend,” Mr D’Souza says. “I had to come up with these explanations for why I was travelling all the time. My cover story was that I was doing intellectual property consulting … which is so boring, no one says ‘tell me more’.”

Billionaire Peter Thiel, who was outed as gay by Gawker. Picture: Getty Images

Mr D’Souza describes Gawker’s writers as pornographers rather than journalists, and describes the eventual victory as a triumph for journalism. Mr Thiel says the case has been his greatest philanthropic endeavour.

“The term ‘revenge porn’ has now entered the common ­consciousness, and many jurisdictions have now legislated against revenge porn including in ­Victoria, and many US states,” Mr D’Souza says.

“I don’t think that would have happened without what we did.”

It’s just the start for Mr D’Souza, who has big plans for what he can accomplish in both the business world and philanthropy. “I like doing things that other people think are impossible,” he says.

“Climbing mountains that can’t be climbed. Here was this impossible task. Over 3000 people had written letters of complaint about Gawker, but none of them had the fortitude to do what we did.

“These weren’t 3000 people who were under-resourced in some respect, they were celebrities, CEOs, and huge multi­national corporations. And the most they could muster was ‘please take this article down’. None of them had the fortitude to actually do anything. We did.”