By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, July 2012
In early July 2012, KTLA entertainment reporter Sam Rubin’s Twitter account was hacked over a weekend — and the situation produced an unusual secondary story when Gawker’s Louis Peitzman read something darker into Rubin’s hacked feed even after Rubin had explicitly stated the account was compromised.
Then
Sam Rubin had been KTLA’s entertainment reporter and anchor since 1991 — one of LA-local-TV’s most-recognized faces. The recursive element the original FishbowlLA piece flagged was the Gawker pile-on — treating compromised-account content as if it might be revealing rather than simply hacked.
Matthew Fleischer’s FishbowlLA framing was sympathetic to Rubin.
Now
Sam Rubin continued at KTLA across the entire interval after the 2012 hack. He died unexpectedly on May 10, 2024, at 64 — ending a 33-year KTLA run that was one of the longest-tenured single-station American entertainment-reporter careers.
Gawker shut down in 2016 following the Hulk Hogan / Peter Thiel-funded litigation.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of early-2010s social-media-hack coverage culture — substantially poignant in retrospect given Sam Rubin’s 2024 death.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.