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Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail

posted by martyb on Friday February 08 2019, @08:31AM   
from the bare-facts dept.

takyon writes:

Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail

Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive and the world's richest man, accused the owner of The National Enquirer on Thursday of trying "extortion and blackmail" to stop his investigation into how his private text messages and photos with his mistress were leaked to the tabloid.

In an extraordinarily personal online post, Mr. Bezos said intermediaries of David Pecker, the chairman of American Media Inc., the nation's biggest tabloid news publisher and owner of The National Enquirer, had approached him to stop his investigation. Mr. Bezos said he had been told that if he refused, the publisher would make risqué and intimate photos of the billionaire and his mistress, Lauren Sanchez, public.

[...] "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," Mr. Bezos wrote of A.M.I., explaining why he had decided to speak out. "I prefer to stand up, roll this log over and see what crawls out."

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Original Submission

• Re:Powerful Enemies (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:15PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:15PM (#798411)

  Ah, I think this is the key, from this article [thehill.com].

  Bezos in the Medium post accused AMI of threatening him after Pecker discovered he had initiated an investigation into the Enquirer. He wrote that they were threatening to publish the photos unless he ended the investigation and made a public statement claiming he had "no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces."

  Bezos also suggested that Pecker was upset by The Washington Post's coverage of the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

  AMI last year agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors after admitting that it paid $150,000 to a woman "in concert with" Trump's campaign "in order to ensure that the woman did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election."

  The agreement stated that AMI “shall commit no crimes whatsoever” for three years or it would be "subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this office has knowledge," according to The New York Times.

  Don't worry, though, Pecker says he's going to get to the bottom of it! Rogue reporters, no doubt. "Don't worry, we've fired them for violating our stringent ethics policies. No need to investigate further!"

  Parent

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