Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (2017) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Brian Knappenberger. The film opens with a lawsuit: Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media over a leaked sex tape. Then the story gets bigger.

It turns out Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel had been secretly bankrolling Hogan's legal fight for years — not out of principle, but personal vendetta against a publication that had outed him. Gawker lost, went bankrupt, and shut down. Knappenberger uses the whole sequence to ask how much of the free press depends on simply not annoying anyone rich enough to litigate it into the ground. The question hasn't aged well — meaning it's aged too accurately. Stream Nobody Speak (2017) online on iFILM.