“If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”
Jeff Bezos on Thursday publicly described private photos of penis in what he said was a move to preempt being blackmailed by the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.
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In a blog post on the Medium website – appropriately titled “No thank you Mr. Pecker” – Bezos alleged that AMI had just a day earlier made him “an offer I couldn’t refuse,” i.e., threatened him with “blackmail and extortion.” As proof, he provided what he said was an email exchange between himself and AMI executives.
According to Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the world’s richest man, AMI executives were upset with suggestions in the media, including in his Washington Post, that the Enquirer last month ran an expose about his affair with TV personality Lauren Sanchez as a political hit job on behalf of President Donald Trump. The Enquirer article, which included sexts from Bezos to Sanchez, publicly blew up his marriage.
Bezos also admitted in the blog post that he had hired private investigators to figure out how AMI got ahold of his texts, and suggested that he is a subscriber to the Trump-inspired hit job theory. He said that Trump clearly considers him an “enemy” based on The Post’s coverage of his presidency, and noted that AMI has ties to Trump and has admitted helping him out during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Anyway, Bezos said that AMI offered him the following deal: If he announced that he doesn’t think the Enquirer story about his affair was politically motivated, AMI would not be forced to publish new texts and photos that executives suggested would further embarrass the billionaire and his girlfriend. In one alleged email reprinted by Bezos, AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard described 10 such photos, including a “below the belt selfie — otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick.’”
Bezos acknowledged that he did not want the photos published, saying they could cause him “personal embarrassment. But he declared that he was taking a stand for the little guy and journalistic ethics:
If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? … These communications cement AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism. Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
Amazon has declined to comment further on the matter, and AMI has yet to respond.
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