The founder of conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit said Wednesday that the company was filing for bankruptcy while it fights ongoing defamation lawsuits.
Jim Hoft, the site’s founder, said in a after that Gateway Pundit’s parent company, TGP Communications, had decided to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of Florida “as a result of the progressive liberal legal attacks on our media.” Hoft emphasized that the move was “not an admission of guilt or guilt” and said the site would continue to publish.
Gateway Pundit did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
For twenty years, the site has been publishing untruths and conspiracy theories about everything from vaccines to election fraud. Donald Trump oftenshares his material.
The most notable lawsuit against the website is from Georgian election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. In 2021 they indicted the Gateway Pundit, Hoft and his twin brother, and website employee Joe Hoft in St. Louis Circuit Court for defamation and emotional distress. The website had falsely claimed that the mother-daughter pair had purposefully manipulated the vote count in Joe Biden’s favor.
“How are you, Ruby,” the Gateway Expert head naming Freeman read. “BREAKING: Crooked Cop Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED.” Trump himself later brought up the pair, including Freeman by namein a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, using them in part to justify his request that Raffensperger “find” Trump the votes needed to win the state.
Reporting on the website alleged, among other things, that Freeman and Moss “brought out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election observers in the room.” (The “suitcases” were Actually just standard ballot boxes.)
A wave of threats and intimidation followed, including at election workers’ homes. “It turned my life upside down,” Moss testified to the House committee on January 6.
The Hofts, for their part, have claimed that they honestly believed the election was stolen and that they did not knowingly defame Freeman and Moss, and that their reporting on the couple existed of “statements of opinion based on revealed facts, or statements of rhetorical exaggeration that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.” The site and the twins behind it later filed a counterclaim, which was dismissed; Freeman and Moss’ lawsuit is currently awaiting trial.
The Trump campaign played a major role in perpetuating disinformation about Freeman and Moss, and the pair sued Rudy Giuliani also for his role in spreading lies about their work. The former Trump lawyer tried to shift the blame to Gateway Pundit, but ultimately a jury promised Freeman and Moss received $148 million in damages last year in that defamation case. Recently a U.S. District Judge ruled against Giuliani’s appeal of the verdict. Giuliani also filed for bankruptcy.
“I miss my name,” Freeman told reporters after the case against Giuliani was concluded, lamenting the negative attention he had caused.
Gateway Pundit is too called in a defamation suit filed by a former employee of Dominion, the voting machine company defamed by Trump and his allies, against the former president and key supporters of his 2020 campaign. Conservative media, included Gateway expert, depicted Eric Coomer, the former employee, as an election-stealing mastermind after Colorado-based conspiracy theorist Joe Oltmann alleged that Coomer had bragged during a so-called “Antifa conference call” about ensuring an election victory for Biden.
Earlier this month, a three-judge panel ruled on a Colorado appeals court ruled that Coomer’s case could proceed.
Gateway Pundit, despite its often unrestricted reporting, has played an outsized role in the conservative media sphere – although traffic peaked in 2020. Multiple Republican-led states pulled out from a popular anti-voter fraud organization after the site wrongly reported that it was “founded” by George Soros and was “essentially a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as a voter roll purge.”
