Billionaire investor Peter Thiel has agreed to end his pursuit of Gawker.com to avoid a potential lawsuit over his secretly funding litigation that drove the news and gossip blog’s publisher out of business, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy. The agreement between Thiel, his firm Thiel Capital LLC and an adviser liquidating Gawker Media LLC was filed yesterday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. The agreement concludes more than a year of legal wrangling over a possible lawsuit and clears the way for a sale of Gawker, which ceased publishing in 2016 but remains on the web. Thiel has agreed to withdraw from the sale process and to provide the eventual buyer a legal release for articles in the Gawker archive. The release also covers writers who wrote articles for the site before the blog shut down, according to the filing. Lawyers for Gawker Media have asked a judge to sign off on the agreement. The sparring with Thiel was one of the last open issues in Gawker Media’s nearly two-year-old bankruptcy. Thiel funded retired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan’s successful legal case against Gawker over its publishing excerpts from a surreptitiously recorded video of a sexual encounter with the wife of his former friend, radio show host Bubba the Love Sponge.
