Deadline’s Dirty Laundry

There’s no question the storyline has built-in conflict. Finke’s desire to take back the website she founded and sold – only to be sold again to her own competition at Variety – is well known. Penske’s intention to keep Finke under contract until 2016 has been stated more than once.

Finke turned up the flamethrowers from her Hawaiian outpost in late October while she reportedly prepares NikkiFinke.com for launch.

She all but announced her departure from the institution she founded Oct. 24, in a series of tweets accusing Penske of “making it official” by pulling the Deadline newsfeed from her personal Twitter account.

Finke announced she will “unveil” her site after the new year, adding, “Can’t wait to report the real truth about Hollywood.”

She finished the triptych with: “All that’s left is for the lawyers to disentangle me from Penske. I have no idea why he has fought so hard to keep me. I’ll be free soon.”

Not 24 hours later, Finke tweeted that she’d been “locked out” of Deadline.com on Penske’s order, and accused her boss of threatening to “wage ‘nuclear war’ on me unless I obeyed him and stayed at Deadline. He started [Oct. 23].”

Deadline’s Mike Fleming then posted his own deconstruction of events on Deadline.com, complaining that Finke’s “latest flurry of dispatches” turned an “internal matter, her dissatisfaction, into a public spectacle.”

Fleming denies Finke was locked out of the site but says she has been restricted to filing and editing her own stories.

He complains that by running links to Deadline stories that ran on her @NikkiFinke Twitter feed, she “gives the appearance she writes every story on Deadline, when her output continues to diminish.”

And in a not-very-convincing bit of spin, Fleming – who’s considered something of a “lieutenant” of Finke’s but appears to have read the writing on the wall – writes that her colleagues at Deadline are just trying to let Nikki be Nikki

“We are trying to strip away the distractions and diversions that have gotten between her doing what she does best, which is filing provocative copy,” Fleming wrote. “We want the old Nikki back. If she returns … we will welcome her with open arms. If she doesn’t, we will survive, knowing in our hearts that she is miscast as the victim in this drama.”

The cliffhanger continues, with Finke dropping her tweets about Deadline in favor of retweets from its newsfeed – and of the barbs of #TeamNikki – in a sort of radio silence while, presumably, lawyers get to work.