Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says the National Enquirer’s parent 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.
The company also demanded Bezos agree publicly that its previous coverage of him wasn’t politically motivated, he wrote in a post on the website Medium that included copies of emails from representatives of American Media Inc., also known as AMI.
“I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Or at least that’s what the top people at the National Enquirer thought,” wrote Bezos, who is the world’s richest man and separately owns the Washington Post.
But “any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat,” he said, “because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”
An AMI spokesperson didn’t immediately return an email and voice message seeking comment. After the National Enquirer’s Jan. 21 publication of racy exchanges between the Amazon founder 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 has obtained several suggestive photos of him and of Sanchez, some of which show the billionaire partially unclothed, according to the emails published by the Amazon founder.
In those emails, the media company threatened to publish the photos unless Bezos publicly stated he had “no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces” and agreed to stop referring to “such a possibility.”
If Bezos reneged on the proposed agreement, AMI would retain the right to publish the photos, the emails say. When Bezos argued that the National Enquirer had no right to publish the photos, the publication claimed they were newsworthy because they would show Amazon shareholders he had exercised poor judgment.
Bezos demurred. “I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the No. 1 and No. 5 most valuable company in the world,” he said, suggesting the results speak for themselves.
AMI’s communications, on the other hand, 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.”
While acknowledging that his ownership of the Washington Post, which AMI said was spreading rumors about its coverage, makes the situation more complex, Bezos said he has no regrets.
“It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy,” he noted. “President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets.”
Indeed, Trump has repeatedly argued that Seattle-based Amazon pays insufficient taxes, under-compensates the Postal Service for delivery of its packages and exploits the Post for lobbying purposes.
Axios reported in 2018 that Trump, who has described unfavorable Post coverage as “fake news,” had mused about using anti-trust laws to rein in Amazon.
“The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission,” Bezos said. “My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long.
