A Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial. I’m Its First Target

For many journalists, blowback is just part of the business.

The irate call to the editor or publisher, often expressed through the promise of litigation. The online pile-on, often expressed through personal invective. Occasionally, the threat of violence, often expressed through all-caps derangement.

It’s rare to encounter a novel variant. But on April 21, I received a remarkable email. “Someone has filed an objection against something you wrote,” explained Austin Livingston, pointing me to a web page where Purdue Pharma heir Michael Sackler, a film financier and self-styled ethical investor, had paid a new tech startup — fittingly called Objection — to assess the legitimacy of a skeptical article I’d published about him and his business in The Hollywood Reporter five years earlier.

Livingston, a young staffer who describes his job on LinkedIn as, simply, “creating shareholder value,” noted that an AI tribunal would attempt to “adjudicate a determination of truth,” and that the announced outcome “will also affect your Honor Index score, a measure of the veracity of your published work.” He went on, adding, “You can argue your side by uploading your evidence and suggesting your interpretation of the allegation.”

I perused the web page, designated “Sackler v Baum (2026).” It featured a countdown clock ticking toward an apparent verdict. Then I read up on the company, which is backed by the prominent right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who waged a legal war against Gawker Media after it published coverage about his business interests and personal life which upset him. The effort led to the outlet’s demise. At first glance, Objection seemed to be a kangaroo court catering to rich and infamous plaintiffs, the latest service in the lucrative sector of digital reputation management.

I replied to Livingston, explaining I’d consulted with my editors and that The Hollywood Reporter believes the article stands on its own. However, I was interested in writing about Objection. Two weeks later, I found myself in a revealing and at times baffling exchange with the Oxford-educated brain trust behind the firm about the nature of truth, trust, transparency and power.

Activists protesting Purdue Pharma and its owners, members of the Sackler family, who settled a lawsuit regarding their role in the opioid crisis for billions of dollars. Michael A. McCoy/For The Washington Post/Getty Images

***

Objection’s Founder and CEO is Aron D’Souza, an Australian entrepreneur and provocateur best known as the mastermind behind Thiel’s litigation strategy against Gawker, which involved a patient, extensive search for the ideal proxy plaintiff to sink the online news outlet. The campaign, quietly funded by the tech investor, culminated in Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion-of-privacy suit and ultimately helped force Gawker into bankruptcy. Thiel’s involvement, with D’Souza as the intermediary to Hogan attorney Charles Harder, was exposed after the verdict.

More recently, Thiel has backed D’Souza’s company Enhanced Games — dubbed the “steroid Olympics” — which offers athletes financial incentives to compete under rules that allow performance-enhancing drugs. The company, which also counts Donald Trump Jr. as a key investor, went public in early May.

To discuss Objection, D’Souza and I convened for a video call along with the company’s chief technology officer, Kyle Grant-Talbot. They played rugby together at Oxford. D’Souza, in the signature quarter-zip of the startup tribesmen, exuded the confidence and finesse of someone long adept at raising money. Grant-Talbot, an Englishman whose CV includes engineering stints at NASA and SpaceX, struck me as his more grounded counterpart.

Peter Thiel (left) secretly funded the winning lawsuit of Hulk Hogan (right) against Gawker, which resulted in the site’s bankruptcy.

Alex Wong/Getty Images; John Pendygraft-Pool/Getty Images

D’Souza, who’s long had the notion of rating news outlets, started Objection after an extended discussion about the concept with the prominent Silicon Valley investor-entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan. (He now has stakes in both Objection and Enhanced Games.) “The Gawker litigation taught me that courts are too slow and they’re too expensive,” says D’Souza. “In 2016, after we won the Gawker verdict and Gawker went bankrupt, I considered the idea of buying Gawker and turning it into a news rating website.”

A decade later, he explains, “We’re the first people to sell adjudication as a service,” comparing his venture to well-respected legal bodies like JAMS, SIAC and the International Chamber of Commerce, which specialize in alternative dispute resolution outside traditional judicial systems. “They’re private arbitration courts that are very trusted methods of truth-seeking.” Of course, these are consensual private forums. Objection issues public verdicts based on investigations paid for by one party, which may be negatively impacted by the refusal of the other side to participate in its process.

***

D’Souza grew up in Melbourne, the youngest of three brothers and son of a research scientist. His Ph.D. is in intellectual property law. Now splitting his time between London and New York, he’s the type of inveterate founder who’s constantly ginning up business plans. They can be boring (a tech infrastructure firm), niche (a chief of staff association) or whimsical (a notion to fund an Australian poet laureate).

His ideas have been nurtured within a close and influential cohort. “There’s this group of us, 15, 20 of us, that are gay entrepreneurs, and we’ve all holidayed together for years,” D’Souza told The Sydney Morning Herald in February. “It’s an extraordinarily tight community that has propelled me, and all of us together, to the heights of capitalism.”

To him, it’s unsurprising that these paradigm-shifting overachievers are all gay, citing the landmark 1973 book The Best Little Boy in the World, about how the pursuit of ambition and excellence can help closeted young men deflect from their sexuality. D’Souza has observed that his friends are “the best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.”

These men include Thiel, the German biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer and OpenAI chief Sam Altman — who in 2018 described D’Souza to a reporter as “ruthlessly ambitious” and “obsessed with status and power.” In D’Souza’s interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

Objection founder Aron D’Souza considers himself close with many powerful tech titans. Suki Dhanda/Contour/Getty Images

***

Grant-Talbot outlined several key categories of Objection clients. “The first are people that have been the subject of lawfare, especially in the U.S.,” he explains. “They believe, and we don’t judge, that they’ve been unfairly targeted by the judiciary and either have done time in jail because they’ve had to take a plea deal or they’re on a house arrest or they’re in litigation and they believe that’s unfounded and they want to exonerate themselves.” Some of these people “believe that the media coverage actually instigated the lawfare.”

The second group, according to Grant-Talbot, are famous people, mainly influencers, “whose reputation is their brand,” and who believe a viral story has led to lost income from licensing deals and similar revenue streams. The third, “probably my favorite,” are those who “just have a really, really annoying article that’s written about them in a local outlet that just is constantly in the back of their mind.”

Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.” He notes that most of them “have no media skill whatsoever” and have “never sought the spotlight,” so he contends that “there’s a massive power asymmetry.”

To D’Souza, such “quiet, boring,” super-rich clients in fact aren’t resourced enough — which is why they need Objection. “Someone who is our ideal customer, it’s not Elon [Musk], who has hundreds of millions of combined social media followers, and has the distribution apparatus itself,” referring to his ownership of the networking platform X. “It’s not Peter Thiel, who’s sophisticated and has high distribution. It’s someone like Michael [Sackler], who has low distribution but high wealth.”

***

My profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objection’s tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. “You’re Exhibit A,” D’Souza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the company’s soft launch: “Building software is hard.”

The article I published in April 2021, co-reported with Alex Ritman, was given the online headline “From Opioid Crisis to Hollywood: Heir to Purdue Pharma Undergoes ‘Identity Makeover.’ ” It explained that Sackler, the film producer turned venture capitalist, “has refashioned himself as a self-styled ethical investor, but some see an attempt to escape accountability for his family’s role in the OxyContin scourge.”

Sackler spoke to THR, including about how he viewed himself in relation to his family and fortune. “I’ve not been a part of the business,” he said, referring to Purdue, which went bankrupt after settling a slew of claims that it had exacerbated OxyContin’s widespread abuse. “It’s something that is a historical legacy, it’s nothing to do with me,” he said, explaining that he was still a minor when claims against the company first materialized. (