Destroying Gawker: ‘Mr A’ mastermind behind Hulk Hogan sex tape case reveals himself

The Hulk Hogan sex tape case that destroyed a media empire is well known, but its Australian mastermind has stayed hidden. Until now.

Aron D'Souza. Picture: Julian Kingma

Australian law graduate Aron D’Souza was sitting at a dinner table opposite Silicon Valley’s most powerful man, the billionaire PayPal co-founder and Facebook’s first investor, Peter Thiel. D’Souza, a 26-year-old entrepreneur, was nervous but confident. This was one of ­Berlin’s finest restaurants, ­frequented by world leaders, and Thiel was here at his ­invitation. D’Souza was hardly flush — he’d been staying on a friend’s couch, and had caught a train to this meeting — but he ordered the six-course degustation menu because he needed time to pitch an audacious plan that would take three to five years to unfold and cost Thiel upwards of $10 million. It was a meeting that would change many lives.

“If this had been pitched as a ­Hollywood script, people wouldn’t believe it,” Thiel tells me from his nondescript Los Angeles office lined with Donald Trump books and memorabilia. “It’s extraordinary what we did. And I don’t think this is too hyperbolic… It was one of my greatest philanthropic endeavours.”

That one meeting in Berlin set in train events that brought down one of new media’s pioneering stars, the equally reviled and admired news and gossip site Gawker. It involved one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, Hulk Hogan, a lurid sex tape, and a lawsuit that would see a US jury award $US140 million ($190 million) to Hogan (real name Terry Bollea), sending Gawker into bankruptcy. It has had a profound impact on the US media landscape and on the right to privacy. Depending on your view, it was either a gift to the world, as Thiel says — or a strike to the heart of freedom of speech.

D’Souza, now 33, has never spoken publicly about his role in the secret plot that consumed five years of his life. Countless articles have been written about it, a Netflix documentary was made, a Hollywood screenplay is in the works and a book has been published, but the central character — “Mr A”, as he was known — has previously declined every request to speak on the record. Now that the case is resolved, though, D’Souza is ready to end the mystery and confirm that he was the mastermind behind a legal strike described as one of the most consequential lawsuits in the history of modern American media. “I have never been one to seek the spotlight,” he tells me over dinner in Melbourne. “I find it uncomfortable talking about it. It’s such a change of mindset for me to now discuss this.”

Peter Thiel. Picture: Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Peter Thiel settled into the Berlin restaurant and ran his eye over the wine list. He ordered the second most expensive riesling, in keeping with his thesis that the priciest wine is just for show and the second most expensive is actually the best. D’Souza broached the subject that had brought them here: “I know what you think about Gawker,” he told Thiel. “Here’s what I’m proposing.”

For years — and this is how D’Souza and Thiel characterise it — Gawker had been a schoolyard bully, picking fights with celebrities and relative unknowns without hesitation or basic fact-checking. Started in 2002 by UK journalist Nick Denton, it began as a website for rumours about Manhattan celebrities and the media industry but soon grew to become one of the world’s most visited — and controversial — websites, spinning out to other sites including Gizmodo, Jezebel and Lifehacker.

The two still get visibly agitated talking about Gawker. Thiel refers to it as the “MBTO”, or ­“Manhattan-Based Terrorist Organisation”, while D’Souza describes its editors as pornographers rather than journalists. Thiel became fixated on Gawker back in December 2007 when its tech blog Valleywag published a post headlined “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”. It was a short article, 397 words, and wasn’t the first or last time the site would comment on someone’s sexuality. It wasn’t unusual for Gawker and didn’t make any big waves at the time; Thiel’s sexuality was already an open secret among family and friends. What was unusual was his reaction to the story, and the means he had at his disposal to do something about it.

Thiel, who is not only one of tech’s most ­important figures but also one of its most mysterious, is worth billions but more importantly he has a patience and determination to play the long game, whether investing in tech start-ups or ­taking on a legal fight. “I think that outing gay people is wrong, it just is,” he says. “It’s a ­personal decision, in terms of who you come out to, and at what point you do it.” The comments underneath the story further stoked his rage. Denton, ­Gawker’s founder and managing editor, showed up in the comments the day after the article’s publication, questioning why Thiel was still in the closet and commenting that maybe his parents didn’t approve of his sexuality because they were Christian, or perhaps Thiel was afraid that he couldn’t get money out of Saudi Arabia. “Neither of these were correct,” Thiel says. “But there was all this sort of psychological speculation, and it’s a far from neutral thing… that’s what really goes on when people get outed. I felt it as an extraordinary violation of my privacy. And there were a lot of things that were factually incorrect about it.”

Thiel says he thought about taking action for years, talking with anyone who would listen to his complaints about Gawker and inviting ideas on what to do about the media company. And then, over ­dinner in Berlin in April 2011, he met the ambitious, well-dressed Melbourne up-and-comer who laid out a plan that might actually work.

Aron D’Souza is a true citizen of the world. He grew up in Australia, California, Switzerland and Ohio. His family on his mother’s side came to ­Australia from China as gold miners in the 1850s, settling in Melbourne, while his father, who is of Indian-Portuguese heritage, arrived from India as a student in the ’60s. Even when based in the US and Europe the family would return home for a few months every year. D’Souza lives in Australia today to be close to his grandmother, who is in her 90s, and to manage his business interests.

He remembers his parents — his father, a research scientist, and his mother, a teacher — constantly inviting an array of guests to dinner, ranging from judges to ambassadors and diplomats. The family would talk long into the night, ensuring that their three children were always included. It’s those conversations that D’Souza says developed his sense of confidence, giving him the ­opportunity to learn about the world and how it works. “They always treated me like an adult,” he says. “I had an army of people at my disposal, quite literally. Those were great people to connect with.”

He did two undergraduate degrees at Monash University, and then a doctorate at the University of Melbourne in political philosophy and intellectual property rights, before heading to Oxford to study law, drawn to the subject not because he had ambitions to practise law but to develop his knowledge as a legal philosopher. D’Souza says it was his time at Oxford that changed the trajectory of his life. He was introduced to leaders in government, philanthropy and business, including Thiel, whom he met through a mutual friend. Within 18 months, D’Souza had managed to convince the entrepreneur that they had the power to do something about Gawker, and that Thiel should meet him for dinner to talk about it.

The pair considered whether Thiel should buy Gawker, but this was quickly discounted because they felt it would reward Denton for bad conduct. Litigation was D’Souza’s favoured option, with the aim of suing Gawker into extinction. His plan was simple: find someone who had been badly damaged by Gawker and was willing to take the company on, and then get Thiel to secretly fund the ­lawsuit. It was a plan that was fully formed — D’Souza had calculated how long the case might take to win and how much it was likely to cost.

“It was a sense of agency, that it was not going to be fast or simple, but nevertheless it was straightforward in the sense that, if you did all these things, if you put all these things in motion, it would be quite powerful,” Thiel says. Complaints about Gawker were not new. “People would complain but no one would ever do anything,” he says. “One of the things you had to do is assess ‘what’s the probability that something like this might work?’ And if a lot of people had tried to do ­something like this and it had failed, that would be a low probability. But if no one had even tried… then it might be more doable. Over the course of that dinner it really struck me that probably no one had seriously tried in any way. And so if we had a good plan it might well work.”

D’Souza wasn’t driven by any particular hatred of Gawker — though he is gay and did support ­Thiel’s mission. He was more attracted by the challenge. “I like doing things that other people think are impossible,” he says. “Mountains that can’t be climbed. An impossible task. Had I thought about the ethics of ‘pornographic journalism’? Yes, but being able to do something so different and so new was what drew me to this. There have been many billionaires, CEOs and ­Silicon Valley titans over the years who have all said we were so brave to have done that.”

D’Souza laid out his plan: Thiel would set up a shell company to hire investigative reporters and lawyers to track down possible causes of action against Gawker. The plan relied on them finding someone who had a stronger case against Gawker than Thiel; someone who could potentially wring millions from the company in damages. “It might be a moral failing on my part, but [although] I had enough courage to fund it I did not have enough courage to be the front person in this,” Thiel says. In the years to come, he would be criticised for the secrecy of the plan. But Thiel says it was worth it, explaining: “We can debate if one should fund things secretly or not, but I would have been out of my mind to let them [Gawker] know I was doing this. I have no idea what they would have done to me if they’d found out.”

Hulk Hogan.

At first glance, Hulk Hogan didn’t seem to have the strongest case. He’d been filmed in 2007 by his best friend Bubba the Love Sponge, a ­Florida shock jock, having consensual sex with Bubba’s wife Heather Clem — “Not a really cool thing to do,” Thiel acknowledges. Gawker leaked the video online under the title “Even for a ­Minute, Watching Hulk Hogan Have Sex in a Canopy Bed is Not Safe For Work but Watch it Anyway”. Gawker then refused to back down, citing its ­reasons in an article titled “A Judge Told Us to Take Down Our Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Post. We Won’t.” This was despite Hogan declaring that the video had been filmed without his knowledge or consent. The article and its attached video racked up millions of views.

Thiel, D’Souza and their lawyer of choice, Charles Harder — a flashy, TV-ready attorney from Los Angeles — had found their case. They just had to convince Hogan to take up the fight. Behind the scenes D’Souza was pulling strings, acting as ­Thiel’s go-between with Hogan, Harder and the rest of the legal team — all of whom wouldn’t know who was bankrolling the case until after its conclusion.

It was an incredibly ­difficult process, D’Souza says, given that for years he couldn’t tell anyone what he was working on, even his ­boyfriend and family. “I had to come up with these explanations as to why I was travelling all the time,” he says. He was still based in Melbourne but would travel frequently to San Francisco and Florida for the planning and eventually the trial. “My cover story was that I was doing intellectual property consulting. Which is so boring that no one ever inquires. No one says, ‘Tell me more’. ”

D’Souza wasn’t just devoting his time to the Gawker case. As well as working more publicly in law, he founded the Australian branch of the Nexus Youth Summit (a philanthropy organisation linked to the Clinton Global Initiative), was named a Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum, and set up a quarterly legal magazine called The Journal Jurisprudence.

The Gawker plan ended up taking the full five years that D’Souza had predicted, and it did cost Thiel millions of dollars. But it worked. After an arduous years-long trial process, in which Gawker tried to settle three times, Hogan was awarded $US115 million for economic injuries and emotional distress on March 16, 2016. The jury would later add $US25 million in punitive damages. Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy three months after the verdict and put itself up for sale. Denton personally filed for bankruptcy shortly after, and Gawker.com was shut down. (Some of its former media sites such as Gizmodo, Jezebel and Lifehacker are being operated by a different company.) The plot was complete.

Charles Harder. Picture: Getty Images

Harder describes the verdict as a “win-win-win”. Hogan’s “privacy rights were invaded in a very severe way,” he tells me. “I wanted to help him; he wanted the help; and a third party was willing to fund the case… And we won a $140 million jury verdict.” For Harder, the right to ­privacy in the US was at stake. Not just for Hulk Hogan, but for all Americans. “I am not over­stating this,” he says. “Gawker was advocating that any site which posted information about people should be allowed to post secretly recorded footage of a person naked in a private place, including a bedroom. This was a massive threat to the privacy rights of everyone in ­America — not just celebrities, but everyone.”

Winning the case — and doing so in such ­spectacular fashion, which Harder describes as “knocking the bully’s lights out” — brought in a host of new clients for the lawyer, including US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania. He represented the First Lady in her defamation case against Britain’s Daily Mail, which agreed to pay her nearly $US3 million and issue a full retraction and apology over claims she “provided services beyond simply modelling”. “That victory led to my work for the President and the recent court ­victory against Stormy Daniels, ­getting her defamation case thrown out and an order requiring her to pay the president’s legal bill,” Harder says.

“It’s a dangerous world,” he adds. “A person or business can build up a valuable reputation, slowly over 20 years, 30 years or more, only to have it potentially destroyed by false media reports in a 24-hour news cycle. People and companies need protection from the out-of-control media. That’s where we step in.”

To others, though, the Gawker case raises contentious issues. Was the payout too high? Should an entire media company have been shut down because one ­billionaire didn’t like what was written about him? Where does the notion of the freedom of the press come into all this?

Thiel describes the plot against Gawker as a form of philanthropy, and takes issue with those who characterise the case as a billionaire trying to silence the media. He sees it as doing ­journalism a favour. “I think Gawker was a ­singularly sociopathic bully,” he says. “And I believe that there will not be something like that that can happen again. There was an opening for something like that in the early 2000s [but] I think it’d be very hard to start something like this from scratch. I think there was something about Gawker where hate was intentionally weaponised, in a really extraordinary way. It was this scapegoating machine.”

Despite the overwhelming victory, and while he’s proud of the result, for D’Souza there’s still an undercurrent of despondency surrounding the case, in that someone even of Hulk Hogan’s ­stature had to rely on a tech billionaire to fund his case. Thiel agrees. “Even though [Hogan] was perhaps the most ­successful pro wrestler of all time, it was beyond his means to pay for this and get redress. That is an extraordinary fact.”

D’Souza says the case taught him the importance of patience, and also that there are many more conspiracies going on than one might think. The nature of a conspiracy is of course that they are hidden from plain sight, but D’Souza says the sheer number of them would surprise most ­people. “Take Alex Jones,” he says, referring to the infamous conspiracy theorist behind the InfoWars website. “He was banned by all the major social media platforms on the same day. There were lawsuits filed all by the same lawyer. Someone out there is co-ordinating it… there is much more complex co-ordination effort out there than meets the eye.”

Gawker founder Nick Denton. Picture: Fred Lee/ABC via Getty Images

Nick Denton did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but he opined in a blog post earlier this year — now deleted — that the saga demonstrates the power of “dark money” in the legal system. “By some it was seen as a playbook — using proxy plaintiffs and litigation finance; ­techniques  for powerful people to punish critical journalists,” he wrote. “It’s a shame the Hogan trial took place without the motives of the plaintiff’s backer being known. If there is a lasting legacy from this experience, it should be a new awareness of the danger of dark money in litigation finance. And that’s surely in the spirit of the ­transparency Gawker was founded to promote. As for Peter Thiel himself, he is now for a wider group of people to contemplate.”

Sam Altman is president of Silicon Valley’s ­biggest and most successful “startup accelerator”, Y Combinator, and runs the non-profit artificial intelligence research organisation OpenAI, of which Elon Musk was a director until recently. Altman is a friend of D’Souza and describes him as “ruthlessly ambitious”. He says he wasn’t surprised to hear about his work on the Gawker case. “Plenty of people will tell you he’s a ­monster networker,” Altman says. “He is really competent and is obsessed with status and power in a way that is hard for me to relate to. He definitely is someone with these aggressive goals that most people would describe as too audacious… they’re goals that most people would be at minimum unwilling to say out loud, but more likely wouldn’t even shoot for. And I really respect that about Aron.”

Another close friend, who requested anonymity, says D’Souza’s ambition can sometimes rub people up the wrong way. “What’s amazing, though, is that he has an incredible ability to win people over, and I think most people who might be put off at first wind up coming to like and respect him enormously,” the friend tells me.

“I think Aron is so ambitious in part because he is such a strong strategic thinker. He can see a way to accomplish things and solve problems that other people might think of as impossible or even laughable. In other words, what some people see as hyper-ambition is just him thinking through how to get from A to B. He’s also just a little bit eccentric — maybe nine parts ambitious and focused, one part eccentric. I respect that about him too, because it makes him more ­imaginative and willing to look at challenges that other people don’t see.” The friend describes the Gawker situation as highly complex, but says D’Souza’s motivation to pursue it as an access-to-justice issue was proof that his heart is in the right place. “I think that this tendency to see his individual pursuits in the context of broader social issues is one of his core traits.”

Australian entrepreneur Phillip Kingston is also close to D’Souza. The pair met in 2012, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. “We didn’t need to do too much due diligence on each other,” Kingston says with a smile. “We just trusted each other straight away.” In 2013 the pair founded ­Sargon, a financial technology company that has a stated mission of exporting superannuation to the world. Kingston serves as its CEO, with D’Souza managing director. Kingston didn’t know about the Gawker plot — just that D’Souza had to travel a lot — and the pair worked methodically on the company that now spans Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, providing financial institutions and entrepreneurs with the technology they need to grow investment funds and financial products.

Like D’Souza himself, Sargon has been flying under the radar, plotting a big splash for 2019. And as with the Gawker case, D’Souza is quietly working away, patiently plotting its trajectory until everything is in its right place.

Peter Thiel was an early investor in Sargon, but Kingston and D’Souza bought him out to increase their stake in the company. Thiel and D’Souza still travel together several times a year and remain close. “Aron is the sort of guy where nothing is beneath him,” Kingston says. “He’ll be on a call with a world leader and walking around the office dusting. Every office cleaner we’ve ever had, he’ll invite to our Christmas party. He’ll be introducing our office cleaners to the CEOs of banks. He has no concept of hierarchy; he just says, ‘Let’s get them all talking’.”

D’Souza says he has great ambitions for his life beyond the Gawker case. He uses planning documents in which he details his objectives for each week and month, stretching out to 10 years’ time. He describes the success he’s had with the Gawker case and soon with Sargon as “two out of three” — “I want to do one other large commercial venture,” he explains. “I want to wind up when I’m 40. I then want to dedicate my life and capital to philanthropic pursuits. First I need to build the capital base, the human capital network, and the mental disposition I need to achieve great things.”

“He’s just getting started,” Thiel says with a nod. “Really just getting started.”