Whether it meets the legal definition or just the ethical one, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has provided damning evidence that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him.
And don’t put much stock in the pledge from American Media Inc., the supermarket tabloid’s parent company, to “promptly and thoroughly” investigate Bezos’ claims. AMI is privately owned, with a board fiercely loyal to its chairman, David Pecker. And AMI already insists “fervently” that it “acted lawfully.”
In fact, federal prosecutors will look at criminal charges, and whether AMI violated its plea deal on that hush-money payment to an alleged ex-mistress of President Trump.
In a bombshell post on Medium, Bezos laid out a compelling case, backed up by emails, that the Enquirer threatened to print embarrassing photos of him unless he met the paper’s demands.
Last month’s Enquirer exposé of Bezos’ affair with former Fox host Lauren Sanchez included intimate text messages. That prompted the gazillionaire to hire an investigator to discover how the Enquirer got them — and whether the story was politically motivated, given the paper’s close ties with Trump, who has frequently slammed Bezos and his Post.
Then, says Bezos, came warnings from AMI lawyers and officials (all in writing) that he use “common sense” and state publicly that no political motive was involved — or else the Enquirer would publish the racy photos, including a “below-the-belt selfie.”
Bezos instead went public, saying he prefers to “stand up, roll this log over and see what crawls out.” Excellent: If this scam can work against the world’s richest man, everyone is vulnerable.
Others, including Ronan Farrow, say the Enquirer has also threatened them in bids to halt their reporting. So Bezos hit the nail on the head when he accused AMI of “weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism.”
The price needs to be very high indeed for abusing the Constitution’s protections of press freedom.
