Conspiracy

The conflict at the heart of this story is no different. Its genesis is a largely obvious, mostly unremarkable blog post—not even four hundred words long—that outed a little-known technology investor as homosexual. Written by a gossip blogger named Owen Thomas, for a now-defunct tech news website owned by Gawker called Valleywag, the piece was published at 7:05 p.m. on December 19, 2007, under a headline that would sear itself into the mind of its subject: