Gawker's Christine O'Donnell sex smear marks a new low | Richard Adams

Christine O'Donnell wins sympathy from all quarters after salacious personal attack appears on Gawker gossip siteGiven her bizarre past remarks on witchcraft and masturbation, it's hard to imagine how Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell could be transformed from a figure of fun into one deserving sympathy. Yet that's the remarkable feat the US gossip website Gawker managed to achieve yesterday.After publishing an gruesomely-detailed and salacious account of a years-old booze-fuelled encounter between O'Donnell and an anonymous source, it was Gawker that attracted a storm of criticism from all shades of political opinion in the US, and produced some unlikely defenders for O'Donnell.While the strait-laced mainstream US media largely refused to touch the story, elsewhere the debate focused on Gawker touching a new low in lascivious online journalism. New York magazine opined: "We've reached the nadir of Christine O'Donnell mockery."The article, written in the breathless prose of a porn magazine's readers' letters page, claimed that the author and O'Donnell had a drunken tryst on Halloween three years ago, revealing the author to be a sexist boor as well as giving too much information about O'Donnell even for the most phobic of her detractors.The National Organisation of Women ? no fan of O'Donnell's hard-edged Tea Party politics ? put out a statement condemning the "slut shaming" tactics used by Gawker and calling it "an affront to all women"."Today the tabloid website Gawker published an anonymous piece titled 'I Had A One-Night Stand With Christine O'Donnell' that takes the routine sexual degradation of women candidates to a disgusting new low. NOW repudiates Gawker's decision to run this piece. It operates as public sexual harassment. And like all sexual harassment, it targets not only O'Donnell, but all women contemplating stepping into the public sphere," said NOW's president Terry O'Neill."Let me be honest: I look forward to seeing Christine O'Donnell defeated at the polls, but this kind of sexist attack is an affront to all women."On Twitter and blogs across the political spectrum the reaction was equally condemnatory.Alex Pareene, who worked at Gawker until earlier this year, described the piece as "explicitly, weirdly misogynistic". Slate politics blogger David Weigel, a Delaware native who has long predicted O'Donnell's defeat in the election for the state's Senate seat, tweeted: "Hey Gawker, I hope a one-day SEO term victory is worth the sleaziest piece of shit story in memory" ? SEO standing for "search engine optimisation", meaning the article was designed to attract internet traffic.Gawker's editor Remy Stern defended the anonymous article as "a great story" that exposed O'Donnell as hypocritical, telling Yahoo's Michael Calderone: "It had nothing to do with her being a woman."Stern also admitted that Gawker had paid a figure in the "low four-figures" to the author, a man later tracked down and exposed by the Smoking Gun website as Dustin Dominiak, a 28-year-old who lived in Philadelphia and has now gone to ground. The Gawker payment included a series of photos of O'Donnell dressed in a ladybird costume for Halloween but with Dominiak's face cut out. Gawker is part of Nick Denton's blog empire, which includes Deadspin, the US sports blog which recently published allegations of NFL star Brett Favre sending photos of his penis to a woman, while its technology stablemate Gizmodo was accused of theft by Apple after it paid $5,000 for a prototype of the latest iPhone.Despite all the uproar, the question is whether Denton's organisation really cares? So long as the hits and page views keep coming, even trafficking in tales of Christine O'Donnell's personal grooming is justified ? especially as Gawker's readership trails well behind its bigger rivals such as TMZ and the website of People magazine in the US.Even O'Donnell's Democratic rival Chris Coons's campaign attacked the piece: "The Gawker item is despicable, cowardly and has absolutely no value at all to any Delaware voters. We denounce it with great vigor."As you might expect, the O'Donnell campaign also condemned the hit piece as "sexism and slander". But displaying its cloth ear for campaign tactics, the O'Donnell camp then went overboard in trying to pin some blame on their opponents in a Facebook update: "Classless Coons goons have proven yet again to have no sense of common decency or common sense with their desperate attacks to get another rubber stamp for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda."(The Facebook post was written before the Coons camp issued its denunciation.)This isn't the first time Gawker has shown a prurient interest in O'Donnell's sex life. The site previously published a post entitled: "Meet the Men Who Have Sleepovers with Christine O'Donnell". But yesterday's effort was a post too far.Christine O'DonnellGawker MediaNick DentonRepublicansUS midterm elections 2010US press and publishingInternetWomenUS politicsDelawareUnited StatesRichard Adamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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