Gawker Media is being sued yet again after the blogging network’s traumatic defeat to Hulk Hogan earlier this month, this time by a woman from Portland who claims the news outlet defamed and invaded her privacy through an article in 2007, and she wants $74,000 in reparations.
Teresa Thomas claims that a 2007 Gawker gossip column which speculated she was dating her boss at Yahoo caused her to be at a loss both professionally and personally in her life since.
In her lawsuit, Thomas claims Gawker to be “a limited liability company engaged in the the business of creating, distributing and publishing nationally and internationally false and libelous comments concerning the private lives of people,” a weighty claim against the controversial blogging network, but certainly not the first.
After Gawker shared the leaked script for Quentin Tarantino’s then-upcoming film The Hateful Eight, Tarantino launched his own lawsuit during which he described Gawker Media of making “a business of predatory journalism, violating people’s rights to make a buck,” a similar description to Thomas in her lawsuit.
Gawker speculated in their 2007 article that the reason Thomas had left her job in human resources at Yahoo was because of an office romance between her and the then-head of Yahoo’s internal media group, Steve Moore. Thomas claims that this speculation is incorrect and that her departure from the company was for unrelated reasons while she began a romance with Moore after leaving her position at Yahoo.
“Thomas left Yahoo earlier this year when the relationship heated up, according to a source. Moore denies that’s why she left. ‘We never dated while we worked together, period,’ he said.” wrote Nicholas Carlson in the piece published December 2007 under the title “He pushes them out, she does the paperwork”.
“In any event, Thomas never reported to Moore,” the article continued. “A shame. Imagine the efficiency of such an arrangement. Moore could let his employees know when they’ve become useless to him, and then Thomas could push them out ever so delicately. Really, couldn’t Yahoo could use more synergies like this?”
The public comments on the article included one from her co-worker at Yahoo just three days after, who debated the authenticity of the claims, demonstrating that the news spread around her former office pretty fast after Gawker published the piece.
Thomas is only asking for $74,000, a modest sum in comparison to the $140 million that Hogan won from Gawker after a lengthy privacy invasion trial earlier this month.
Charlie Nash is a frequent contributor to Breitbart Tech and former editor of the Squid Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington.
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