The National Enquirer’s parent company said Friday it was in “good faith” negotiations to resolve issues with Jeff Bezos at the time the Amazon billionaire accused the tabloid of trying to blackmail him.
American Media Inc., or AMI, said it “believes fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story” of Bezos, who says the company threatened to publish embarrassing photos of him unless he stopped trying to find out how the tabloid obtained salacious text messages between him and his mistress.
Nonetheless, the company’s board said in a statement, it will “promptly and thoroughly investigate the claims.”
Along with ending Bezos’ investigation, the publisher also demanded that the Amazon founder agree publicly that its previous coverage of him wasn’t politically motivated, he wrote Thursday in a post on the website Medium that included copies of emails from AMI representatives.
“Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat, because there’s a much more important matter involved here,” wrote Bezos, who is the world’s richest man and separately owns the Washington Post. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”
After the National Enquirer’s Jan. 21 publication of racy exchanges between Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, with whom he was having an affair, Bezos hired security specialist Gavin de Becker to find out how the publication obtained the messages.
Bezos quickly learned, he wrote, that AMI head David Pecker was “apoplectic” about the investigation, which is also looking into what he described as “unusual actions” by the media firm.
Those include an immunity agreement between Pecker, a longtime friend of President Trump, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, which is investigating the tabloid’s purchase of the rights to a never-published story about former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s claims of an affair with Trump before his election. Bezos also highlighted AMI’s publication of a pro-Saudi tabloid the New Kingdom.
Earlier this week, AMI emailed a lawyer representing Bezos to say the tabloid had obtained several suggestive photos of him and of Sanchez, some of which show the billionaire partially unclothed, according to the emails.
AMI’s communications cement the company’s “long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism,” Bezos said. “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.”
