Amazon's Billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos posted several emails from a lawyer for the National Enquirer who emailed his own lawyer while threatening to post pictures he had sent his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, which were highly intimate in nature, if Bezos did not comply with their demands, according to Bloomberg.
Bezos accused American Media Media Inc., which is the publisher of the National Enquirer, of blackmail and extortion since AMI asked him to publicly deny having any political motivation in the publisher's articles detailing his divorce.
Previously Bezos's security boss Gavin de Becker said "strong leads point to political motives" in AMI's coverage of the divorce and affair.
"In the AMI letters I'm making public, you will see the precise details of their extortionate proposal: They will publish the personal photos unless Gavin de Becker and I make the specific false public statement to the press that we 'have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI's coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces,'" Bezos wrote in the post.
Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, revealed last month they were getting a divorce, the same day the National Enquirer ran a story which was about Bezos having an affair with Sanchez, with several private photos of the two dating.
Bezos said AMI was "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," Bezos wrote.
The email Bezos posted on the blog post read: "However, in the interests of expediting this situation, and with The Washington Post poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of The National Enquirer's initial report, I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our newsgathering."
The email then lists several explicit or romantic images they have of Bezos and Sanchez.
"It would give no editor pleasure to send this email. I hope common sense can prevail — and quickly," closes the email written by
Publisher of the national enquirer David Pecker has been a close confidant of President Donald Trump and has been cooperating with federal prosecutors who were looking into the payments made by the publisher before the 2016 presidential election to at least one woman who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.
Bezos also talked about hiring investigators to uncover how the photos were leaked, which some legal experts said could lead to possible criminal prosecution.
Trump has often been critical of Bezos on Twitter and has even requested the U.S. Postal Service raise shipping rates for the company.
The same day the threatening emails were sent to Bezos which described the images, The Washington Post published its own story about the Enquirer's article.
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
Photo:
AP / Evan Vucci
