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you're sitting here at the National Press Club surrounded by journalists do you believe you've set a dangerous precedent in secretly suing Gawker in connection with its publication of the whole culligan video I don't I don't think so you know let's start with uh you know the facts of the case it involved a sex tape you know if you if you make a sex tape of someone with their permission you are a pornographer if you make a sex tape without their permission we were told now you are a journalist I would submit that as an insult to all journalists this is not about the First Amendment it's it is about the most egregious violation of of privacy imaginable publishing a sex tape surreptitiously filmed in the privacy of someone's bedroom on and and to hide behind the First Amendment behind a journalism that is an insult that is an insult to journalists you know I believe journalists are a privileged group in our society they play an important role in in on getting us information in our system of checks and balances um but but these were not these were not journalists well do you think what happened to Gawker could happen to other news publications I mean could wealthy powerful people seek revenge against a news organization because of something they didn't like and use their influence and money to to take them out you know they should wealthy people shouldn't do that I think if they try they won't succeed you know it's uh it's uh the the you know Gawker was it was a pretty flimsy business it was it was a bad business it didn't make that much money but they could have withstood all the lawsuits um you know they lost because the of an enormous verdict that came in against them are you engaged in any other lawsuits against news organizations uh not not have not I you know been involved in the GAR case nothing else and and part of you know part of my thought was again they were a singularly they were a singularly sociopathic bully it was a it my view is that other journalists other media organizations were not remotely in the same ballpark tell us how you got involved and especially how and when you got connected to Charles hardener Hulk Hogan's ad lawyer in the Gawker case and why you did this know secretly it was one of these things where as you got involved you you came to believe in the justice of the case more and more because there were so many different people that you interacted with who had been destroyed you know in many cases in most cases it was it was not it was not super prominent people it was a super wealthy people it was people who couldn't afford to do anything you know and uh and one of the striking things is that if you're if you're middle-class you're upper-middle class if you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan you have no effective access to our legal system it costs too much this was the modus operandi of Gawker in large part it was to go after people who had no chance of fighting back you know we we can debate about whether the more appropriate thing for me would have been to be transparent about about funding it all the way through but my judgement was that that mr. Hogan deserved to have his day in court and that that would have distracted from from his day in court you know he that that transparency in that would have turned it into into this this very different narrative into the Gawker narrative that it's the billionaire trying to to squash the First Amendment rather than what I think it was actually about which was you know an egregious violation of privacy the publication of a sex tape you've had a feud with Gawker for more than a decade as I said in my introduction when do you decide that funding and other persons lawsuit would be the best course of action to take down Gawker and when did you set this in motion my initial view was that what you were supposed to do was you were supposed to take your beatings crouch down go into a fetal position and then hope they moved on to somebody else and uh and sort of around twenty twenty eleven one of my friends convinced me that that if if Gawker could get away with this sort of sociopathic repeat behavior over and over it was this tragedy the Commons nobody nobody would ever you know they would continue to ruin lives one after another and there were many people they did things to far worse than me and and so you know I was convinced that if I didn't do something nobody would