No. Contrary to popular opinion, you can't sue somebody out of existence if they've done nothing wrong. The courts frown on attempts to do that.
For you to do something wrong, you had to cause clearly defined harm. If you're causing harm, why shouldn't you be sued out of existence?
The injustice here isn't that the rich can eliminate bad actors ... it's that the rest of us can't!
We may all agree that enforcing speeding laws is a good thing, and someone who gets a ticket for it deserves the fine. But if I could fund the police department to have a car permanently follow just you around and nail you for each transgression, it turns something that is fair for each individual offense into something unfair in aggregate. Even if by doing so I was making the roads safer, and you technically deserved each fine.
I think Peter Thiel is doing something similar and even though Gawker is in the wrong in the individual case and deserves to lose, I strongly dislike being able to keep paying to throw the justice system against your enemies.
You are also muddying up scale. In your example, the government is much more powerful than the individual. In the Gawker case, all the parties are pretty much at parity.
There has always been yellow journalism. Gawker isn't new. What is new is that this is the first time an establishment like that got a bloody nose. Usually they're the ones using the legal system to silence those they abuse.
I don't think if it's government or individual it changes the inherent unfairness of having someone decide to watch you, and just you, for any sign of a slip up and then getting you punished based on it. Heck, I think most siblings understand this kind of unfairness with uneven parental justice.
> You are also muddying up scale. In your example, the government is much more powerful than the individual. In the Gawker case, all the parties are pretty much at parity.
There's an order of magnitude difference between the net worth of Thiel and Gawker as a whole. And that's on a good day for Gawker.
Why? This is simply how the world works.
It doesn't have to be the justice system.
That's absolutely incorrect. There is ample precedent of people using the civil legal system to suppress the media.
Perhaps you heard of these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_law#Cases_in_t...
Read that over. They did not have a lot of things go their way.
As far as I can tell though they successfully kept the news that they were running a financially fraudulent cult completely out of the mainstream media for decades, until the invention of the internet made that goal increasingly impossible.