Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial.

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.

***

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.

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.

***

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. (As an adult, records show, he was involved in his family’s crisis-management efforts.) “I’m very conscious that how I choose to use my own money is up to me, and I choose to use it in this way” — on his films and VC investing, including AI-related projects — “which I think is a force for good.”

The story also included commentary from critics. A philosophy professor who’d written a book on inherited wealth observed that “it’s not enough to say you’re not the perpetrator. The moral and ethical presumption is that you surrender the fruits if you can. You don’t get credit for doing something else,” adding, “If you’re not giving the money back to the victims, you’re just changing the subject.” The director of an inequality think tank, who happened to himself be an inheritor of dynastic capital, was blunt: “Michael is seeking an identity makeover with this fund. It comes from shame.” He continued, “Privilege is a disconnection drug. It keeps you from seeing a chain of responsibility. It keeps you from feeling pain and suffering. You reconstruct self-narrative. The alternative is facing the suffering, which is huge. You have to deflect onto some other cause that becomes your pet cause instead.”

At the time, Sackler offered no response to these contentions. (As a general matter, D’Souza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting “experts” as part of coverage.) After the article was published, Sackler didn’t quibble with its facts, although he did attempt to assert that his interview had been off the record — it wasn’t.

***

Objection’s framing is prosecutorial and binary, asking whether it’s true or false that THR claimed Sackler had used his firm as an “identity makeover” to deflect from his family’s responsibility for the opioid crisis. Yet the article was an inquiry, not a judgment. The reader makes their determination of Sackler’s motivations and obligations, as well as of the story’s credibility. As the old Fox News slogan had it, “We report, you decide.”

When I point this out, Grant-Talbot, ever genial, responds, “It’s great feedback,” adding, “I’m not a journalist, I’m a technologist.” By the time we spoke, Objection had removed its ominous countdown clock from my virtual trial as the company tinkered with its algorithms. “The AI-based reasoning models are easy in comparison to adjudication,” D’Souza said, perhaps already aware that his company might be accused, at least in its beta phase, of outputting slop justice. “What I would say is our goal isn’t perfection. Our goal is to be as good as the [human] court process.”

Objection assigns a human investigator — at the $2,000 price tier, a college graduate; for $10,000, a former CIA or FBI agent — to gather evidence, which is displayed as exhibits. In my case, just about all of it appeared to be extraneous documentation, like incorporation paperwork for Sackler’s firm, which seemed irrelevant to the matter at hand. Then it prompts a group of AI models (including the name-brand ones such as Claude, ChatGPT and Grok) to act as its jury, analyzing the evidence. D’Souza promises that conclusions will be transparent: “We expose all the math that underpins what we do.”

Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding “so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,” D’Souza says. “What I know from the Gawker litigation, having dealt with not just Hulk Hogan but dozens of other parties who felt like they were aggrieved by the media, is that they actually don’t want a financial remedy. What they want is a moral victory. Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, ‘I did not go to Epstein Island.’ “

***

D’Souza positions Objection as a good-faith effort to reform journalism. For him, it’s a new watchdog out to patrol those other watchdogs that he believes have lost their way. Yet, notably, he wouldn’t name a single example of accountability-oriented reporting of which he does approve, saying he has concerns about the “entire enterprise.”

Among other criticisms, D’Souza dismisses the value of anonymous sources, believing they are discrediting, no matter the justification. Objection dings journalists who utilize them under almost all circumstances, except some reporting involving minors and national security. Yet he’s OK with Objection clients secretly funding adjudications, as Thiel did with Gawker. He notes that “there’s a risk of retribution” for his platform’s customers, before citing the Streisand effect, a media phenomenon in which attempts to suppress or censor information can unintentionally draw far more public attention to it. (This is where I’ll note that Sackler, who either didn’t think or care to cloak his identity when filing his “objection,” didn’t respond to my inquiry for this coverage.)

D’Souza appreciates journalists’ newsgathering ability to build an “empathetic connection very quickly and then draw useful information out of their sources,” but is suspicious of the synthesizing work done to produce stories. He’d prefer raw transcripts to be made available in a “public data room.” It’s a desire complicated by, among other factors, the reality that interviewees often make defamatory statements in unedited conversation, which outlets can be legally liable for publishing.

D’Souza is concerned about what he views as the affliction of journalism on the powerful. (“I’ll accept that I’m powerful-adjacent,” he told TechCrunch in April.) He describes texting with Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, to commiserate about recent damning coverage of the OpenAI chief, co-reported by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker. They see a tie between its publication and attempted violence at Altman’s home and office in the immediate days afterward. “Now, there are a lot of factors at play there, but Ronan’s article was such a huge thing that it’s hard to disconnect the two.”

***

One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”) — was whether he intended to file an objection on his platform to the story you are now reading. “I have to see the article when it comes out and then determine it,” he responded.

After we spoke, I awaited my verdict before the Objection tribunal in the Sackler case. None arrived. Eventually, the landing page was taken offline. I asked D’Souza about it. He explained that Objection would “hold off publishing any adjudications” until “a new major strategic partnership” was announced.

Then the whole site went dark, replaced by a splash page reading: “Due to feedback we’re rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future. Stay tuned for updates.”

D’Souza seems to simultaneously fear, jeer and revere the journalistic role. It’s why he’s drawn, in his own way, to influencing it.

“I always say when I talk to journalists, ‘I’m a philosopher,’ ” he told me amid a broader riff about AI’s transformation of modern life. “What is the special place of being human? I think the very last job that humans are going to have is the first question in philosophy, which is epistemology: the nature of truth and distinguishing between truth and fiction. It’s a very human skill, and that adjudicative function is extremely hard.”

D’Souza continued, “Ultimately, what’s the last job? It won’t be knowledge work. It won’t be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”

This story appeared in the June 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.