Univision Has No Plans To Remove Stories In Response To Demands From Peter Thiel-Backed Lawyer
Attorney Charles Harder, center, is involved
in numerous lawsuits against the now-defunct Gawker Media.
Harder recently threatened John Cook, a former editor of the website,
with a lawsuit over
comments Cook made to FORBES. (Photo by Gerardo
Mora/Getty Images)Charles Harder, the Hollywood lawyer paid by billionaire investor Peter Thiel to represent Hulk Hogan in lawsuits against Gawker Media, is continuing his pursuit of Gawker’s former employees.
On Friday, Gizmodo, a publication previously owned by Gawker that is now operated by Univision Communications, disclosed five recent threats from Harder’s law firm against sister publications Deadspin and Jezebel. One of those threats was in response to comments that John Cook, executive editor at the recently rebranded Gizmodo Media Group, made about Harder in a FORBES story last month. The legal threats demonstrate Harder’s willingness to continue Thiel’s crusade against Gawker Media, which declared bankruptcy in June after losing a landmark invasion of privacy lawsuit to Hogan, the former professional wrestler who was awarded more than $140 million in damages from a Florida jury.
In the Sept. 10 FORBES story titled “Univision Caves To Legal Pressure, Decides To Remove Old Gawker Posts,” Cook said that Harder’s end goal “is to harm people.” Cook’s comments were made following the removal of six articles published on former Gawker Media websites that Univision executives felt were unnecessary legal risks. Cook objected to the decision, which prompted an outcry among current and former employees concerned that taking the stories down would set a precedent when faced with future litigation. “This decision was an affront to an idea that we have been committed to for 13 years, which is that we should be able to say true things about public figures,” Cook told FORBES. Of Harder, he said “I do not believe he has his client’s interests at heart.”
(FORBES has not received any communication from Harder’s law firm regarding the story or Cook’s comments.)
Shortly after the story was published, an attorney at Harder’s law firm, Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, sent Univision’s lawyer a “Demand for Retraction, Apology and Damages.” The letter said that Cook’s comments were “highly defamatory,” and constituted “tortious interference” with Harder’s relationship to current and future clients. “Mr. Harder hereby demands an immediate public retraction … and an apology, as well as the payment of damages or an alternative agreeable solution,” the letter continued. “If Univision and Mr. Cook fail to comply and respond to these demands immediately, Mr. Harder will not hesitate to exercise his rights in pursuing legal against against Univision … and against Mr. Cook himself.”
On Aug. 22, weeks prior to Cook’s comments, Harder sent Univision a series of demands related to other stories in the archives now controlled by the company, including two published by Jezebel in 2014 about Arya Toufanian, cofounder of the “I’m Shmacked” video company. Harder said the articles warranted an “invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress,” and demanded that they be retracted immediately. The stories, along with the others that Harder demanded be removed, remain up today.
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Isaac Lee, Univision’s chief news, entertainment and digital officer, alluded to the threats from Harder in an interview with Gizmodo published on Sept. 12. In the interview, Lee said the decision to remove stories he had inherited wasn’t made on a whim. “We had to decide… if we were going to take down only the ones that had pending litigation or we were going to take down the other ones that had threats of litigation and posed risk to the company,” Lee said. “We decided to leave those [posts that incurred threats of litigation] and to defend them and to defend them as we will any post in the future.”
It’s unclear whether Univision could be compelled to legally remove the stories Harder is now asking them to take down. Generally, once a story is published, any legal liability remains with the entity that originally published the article (in this case, Gawker Media). Still, even the threat of litigation could be enough to prompt retraction of old articles, cautioned Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.
“What’s changed is that control over these archives has moved from Gawker and its owner to a new entity, Univision. And people who have a grievance about these older articles, perhaps they believe that they will find a more receptive audience with the new owner,” Scheer said. “Univision is looking forward, not backward. And, understandably, it doesn’t want to commit lots of resources to litigating articles that it may now own but had no editorial responsibility over when they were created.”
If Harder were to follow through on his threat to sue Cook or Univision, Scheer said he would lose. “What [Cook] said is constitutionally protected expression of opinion,” Scheer said, adding that “these are the kinds of threats that are made by lawyers when they are engaged in ‘scorched earth’ litigation.
source -forbes.com
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