Well, this one blew up. For those who haven't been following along, last night Gawker posted an extensive piece on David Geithner, brother of former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Among the details in the article are the following: [assume the word allegedly is attached to everything]
Furthermore, some very weird stuff has come out about who may or may not be "Ryan" (from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/17/gawker-got-in-bed-with-the-wrong-escort-and-civil-war-ensues.html )
Today, Gawker deleted the post from its website, but not by choice of their editors. Instead, the managing partnership voted 4-2 to remove it, and the editorial staff has not responded well. http://politburo.gawker.com/a-statement-from-the-gawker-media-editorial-staff-1718649722
There's a whole lot going on and this whole thing is an abject disaster for Gawker. I'm gonna have to say I'm going to give this a few more days, but it's not often that a "news site", and I use that loosely, but even Gawker, publishes an extensive article accusing a man of cheating on his wife with a male escort and that man is the only one coming out of this looking even remotely clean.
- Geithner, a married father of 3, solicited sex with a male escort and gay porn star
- He paid "Ryan" (an pseudnym and the primary source for this article) $2500 in cash, as well as covering plane fare and hotel expenses to meet him in Chicago for a tryst
- Numerous examples of texts and pictures (including a selfie of "David", the first-name-only name that Geithner used) shared
- A fedex package with a return address supposedly traceable back to a Geithner family home in Louisiana that contained the $2500 and tickets
- That "Ryan", on figuring out who Geithner was, became determined to blackmail Geithner into helping him with a housing dispute through his connections to the president
- That when Geithner either could or would not produce aid, that Ryan became determined to out him
Furthermore, some very weird stuff has come out about who may or may not be "Ryan" (from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/17/gawker-got-in-bed-with-the-wrong-escort-and-civil-war-ensues.html )
On Friday, the Daily Caller, a right-leaning Washington-based news site, identified “Ryan” as 33-year-old Leif Derek Truitt from Austin, Texas, a male escort and porn star who appears on camera under the name Brodie Sinclair.
In an interview with the Daily Caller, Truitt—who has posted videos claiming that Barack Obama is “the son of the Devil” and the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the Russians—spouted a variety of conspiracy theories concerning the well-connected Geithner family.
Today, Gawker deleted the post from its website, but not by choice of their editors. Instead, the managing partnership voted 4-2 to remove it, and the editorial staff has not responded well. http://politburo.gawker.com/a-statement-from-the-gawker-media-editorial-staff-1718649722
Our union drive has expressed at every stage of the process that one of our core goals is to protect the editorial independence of Gawker Media sites from the influence of business-side concerns. Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection. Our opinions on the post are not unanimous but we are united in objecting to editorial decisions being made by a majority of non-editorial managers. Disagreements about editorial judgment are matters to be resolved by editorial employees. We condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms.
There's a whole lot going on and this whole thing is an abject disaster for Gawker. I'm gonna have to say I'm going to give this a few more days, but it's not often that a "news site", and I use that loosely, but even Gawker, publishes an extensive article accusing a man of cheating on his wife with a male escort and that man is the only one coming out of this looking even remotely clean.