Gawker Media Sued Over Sex Tape

Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart are suing Gawker Media for more than $1 million for posting a sex tape of the couple with a woman named Kari Ann Peniche, according to People magazine's website.

The so-called "sex tape" (the boring footage didn't include any actual sex) was posted on several Gawker Media blogs in August. (It's worth disclosing that this writer worked for Gawker's flagship site in 2004.) You'd be forgiven for not knowing who any of the participants are, but Dane is apparently on ABC's Grey's Anatomy; Gayheart has been around Hollywood for nearly two decades (who can forget her arc on Beverly Hills, 90210 as Dylan's ill-fated girlfriend?) but is probably best known for being charged with misdemeanor manslaughter in the death of a 9-year-old boy she hit with her car in 2001; and Peniche, well, she has one of those newfangled résumés that includes beauty pageants, Playboy modeling, Reality TV, swimsuit design, and allegations of being a madam. This leaked tape (like Paris Hilton's, Kim Kardashian's, and countless others' before) made the trio (briefly) the talk of the Internet before everyone became obsessed with Orly Taitz, Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift, or cats wearing wigs.

As is his wont, Gawker Media owner Nick Denton used the lawsuit as a chance to tout his company's traffic growth via his Twitter feed.

Suing bloggers is a time-honored (though less often, court-rewarded) pursuit by those who feel threatened or insulted by what's been posted online. Apple has done it (repeatedly), as has Goldman Sachs and Universal City Studios (part of NBC-Universal).

In May, the Wall Street Journal's M.P. McQueen offered a story headlined "Bloggers, Beware: What You Write Can Get You Sued" that explained, "In 2007—the most recent data available—106 civil lawsuits against bloggers and others in social networks and online forums were tallied by the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, up from just 12 in 2003. There have been about $17.4 million in trial awards against bloggers to date, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, a nonprofit clearinghouse that tracks free-speech cases."

Over at the New York Times' Media Decoder blog, Denton told David Carr, "I take all suits seriously," but he doesn't seem worried. He's weathered threats of lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters for sex tapes and leaked Scientology videos before. In another tweet he quotes Eric Dane's own lawyer as saying, "if you don't want a sex tape on the Internet, don't make one!"

Good advice. And if you don't want a picture of your cat with a wig all over the Internet, don't put a wig on your cat!