According to Holiday’s account, Harder “picks up the phone and dials [Bollea’s lawyer] David Houston: I represent a wealthy client who is willing to support fights like yours, do you need any help? The voice at the other end of the phone is incredulous. Is this a joke?”

No, it wasn’t. Interestingly, Harder—who declined to comment to The Daily Beast—was never told who was paying his bills, with “Mr. A” acting as middleman, and didn’t learn his benefactor’s identity, according to Holiday’s account, until Thiel’s role was revealed in the media.

Holiday is a 30-year-old college dropout who, at the precocious age of 21 in 2009, was working as PR director for American Apparel; he said he has disliked Gawker—and wrote several New York Observer columns over the years slamming Gawker’s journalism and rooting for Hulk Hogan’s victory—ever since Denton’s gossip site obtained and published embarrassing hacked emails between himself and company executives.

“That was my first introduction to Gawker in an unpleasant way,” he recalled, adding that he believed, erroneously as it turned out, that the story was going to get him fired.

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.