The Mirror

Gawker Media Staff Blast Removal Of Gay Porn Star Story

Betsy Rothstein Gossip blogger
Font Size:

Gawker Media staff has issued a statement rebuking the removal of a story that has caused a shit show for the past 24 hours.

On Thursday night, Gawker published a story outing Condé Nast CFO David Geithner as a straight, married father who sought the services of a gay escort. The two men were allegedly supposed to meet at the Four Seasons in Chicago where they would rendezvous for three hours.

The purported date collapsed when the supposed escort (who seems like a guy with a serious mental illness) threatened to expose Geithner if he didn’t help with a housing issue.

On Friday, Gawker founder Nick Denton removed the story.

Here’s what the recently unionized employees had to say about it.

“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.” 

The letter was published on all Gawker Media sites.