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Roger Ailes has retained the libel lawyer who represents Hulk Hogan in his suit against Gawker and Melania Trump in her suit against The Daily Mail.Attorney Charles Harder sent a threatening letter on Ailes' behalf to New York magazine and its national affairs editor Gabriel Sherman, whose reporting about Ailes' alleged sexual harassment has led the way this summer.
NBC News was aware of video footage of Donald Trump making lewd and disparaging remarks about women for nearly four days, a network executive said Saturday, but delayed reporting about the story out of concern that Trump would sue the network.
It’s an enormously deflating end to the year’s most dramatic media story. Even people suspicious or dismissive of the Hogan story — concerning as it did a sex tape — should feel nervous about the fact that two indisputably true articles were taken down because their subjects were lucky enough to find a billionaire backer with a grudge. The Ayyadurai and Terrill suits were all but certain to have been dismissed when they came to trial early next year. Instead, Ayyadurai — whose claims to have invented email have been thoroughly discredited — will walk away from a billionaire’s proxy legal war substantially richer, and with an accurate but unflattering article about him deleted from the internet.
Gotta say I wasn’t surprised when tech billionaire Peter Thiel endorsed Trump. Peter and I were dormmates at Stanford freshman year, and while I barely knew him?—?we ran in different circles?—?his fiercely Libertarian views were often a topic of conversation among those of us living in Branner Hall. One day I heard a rumor that Peter defended apartheid (which was then still the law of the land in South Africa), which I found morally repugnant. To know that a fellow student, a dormmate for that matter, might defend such a brutally oppressive race-based caste system gave me the willies. But I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt, so I mustered the courage to go to his room to ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise for me, a Black woman. Needless to say, the chill up my spine didn’t go away that day; if anything my fear was now greater knowing I was living with someone who seemed indifferent to human suffering or felt that oppressing whole swaths of humans was a rational, justifiable element of a system of governance. The looming threat of a Trump presidency makes me feel the exact same way.
