#Hogan gawker trial analysis movie#

(Gawker didn’t just kick you when you were down it kicked you with a lip-licking grin.) As the movie reveals, Nick Denton, the British founder and editor of Gawker, created a kind of attack-dog karma that came back to haunt him.

Gawker, of course, was as famous for its tone as its content it specialized in a brand of high-handed blood-sport flippancy that seemed to fuse the spirits of Hedda Hopper, Oscar Wilde, Spy magazine, and a particularly vengeful hanging judge. “Nobody Speak” is 95 minutes long, and its entire first hour hour is devoted to chronicling, in dramatic detail, the 2016 trial that pitted Hogan, the former WWF superstar (who, by that point, was well past his prime as a wrestler), against Gawker, the news-and-gossip website that specialized in serving up the kind of inside information - often petty, but not always - about the egotistic foibles of showbiz, politics, and media that respectable journalism prided itself on leaving out. The decimation of Gawker is Exhibit A, and Knappenberger is eager to fasten onto the larger implications of the case. What the film offers is evidence of a pattern, the shadows of a disturbing trend that add up to a warning: If we, as a society, don’t push back against the chipping away of the freedom of information, it’s only going to get worse, until it eats us alive. It casts a wider net, interweaving several key tales of how the forces of our time - namely, private money and President Trump - are now trying to squash the essential power of the press. “Nobody Speak” isn’t just about the Gawker case.

Hogan gawker trial analysis