In 2020, as the pandemic gripped the world, Cord Jefferson, Max Read, Emma Carmichael and Leah Beckmann spent their days in a Zoom writers room immersed in a project that hit close to home.

All four had worked at the groundbreaking digital blogGawkerin its final years and experienced, as Jefferson put it, the “roller coaster of high highs and low lows” that came with the job, as well as the controversy and criticism that dogged the site because of its no-holds-barred reporting and essays. During its run from 2002 to 2016, Gawker regularly exposed the hubris, hypocrisy and misdeeds of the famous, wealthy and powerful. That those stories were often steeped in snark only added to the fury they sparked.Related StoriesNewsEzra Klein, So Hot Right NowLifestyleMoonves Landing: How a Star Editor Saved W Magazine

Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titledScraperthat was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season.

Scraperwas not a hagiography. Carmichael, who became Gawker’s managing editor in her early 20s, describes the show as “IndustrymeetsSuccession,” with characters based on the characters who worked there. “We were telling the story honestly,” says Jefferson. “It was a morally queasy place, and that makes for interesting television.”

Jefferson and Read say they went into the deal knowing that there was no love lost between Apple and Gawker, the website co-founded by British journalist, blogger and entrepreneur Nick Denton that published a series of blogs in addition to its flagship. In 2010, one of those blogs, Gizmodo, which covered the tech industry, infuriated Steve Jobs when it obtained and published photos of an iPhone 4 prototype that an engineer had left in a restaurant. The next year, another Gawker-owned site, Valleywag, outed Tim Cook in a story headlined, “Meet Tim Cook, the Most Powerful Gay Man in Silicon Valley.”

“Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.”

But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.”

Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read, Carmichael and Beckmann) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)

In August, when Jefferson — who was nominated that July for the Emmy he won for his writing on the HBO miniseriesWatchmen— informed the writers room ofScraper‘s fate, Carmichael says, “I wish I had a screenshot because the playwrights and Hollywood people were, jaws on the floor, gasping, ‘What?’ And all the Gawker people were like, ‘This happens all the time.’ “

Of course, Cook was not the first tech titan to exact revenge on Gawker. In 2016, pro wrestler Hulk Hogan — birth name, Terry Bollea — won an invasion of privacy lawsuit over A.J. Daulerio’s 2012 posting of a 90-second snippet of a sex tape depicting the grappler and the estranged wife of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. The jury’s decision to award $140 million in damages to Hogan — later reduced to a $31 million settlement — forced Gawker Media to file for bankruptcy. Its flagship site went dark, and other sites, including Gizmodo, Deadspin and Jezebel, were auctioned off to the Spanish-language media company Univision.

Source: Drudge Report