Bezos Blackmailed by Enquirer | Your Friday Skinny Latte
You may be a fellow Amazon addict that roots for all of CEO Jeff Bezos’ next big moves or you may hate the fact that Amazon is a monopoly and one of the most valuable companies in the world. Either way, Bezos’ viral retaliation against the National Enquirer has many rooting for him. The National Enquirer, a tabloid that pays sources for tips to help fill their pages with defamatory comments and images about celebrities, published intimate texts between Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez a few weeks ago. One picture was a picture of Bezo’s package that didn’t have the Amazon logo on it—wink. Since then, Bezos has led a team of investigators to uncover how they obtained these texts. The National Enquirer wasn’t too happy with the tabloids being turned around on them and blackmailed Bezos, threatening to publish risque pictures of Bezos (i.e. pictures of Bezos’ privates) if he didn’t end the investigation. What was Bezos’ response? He accused David Pecker (chairman of American Media Inc. (AMI), which owns the National Enquirer), of extortion and published a piece in Medium, an online writing platform, as well as drawing attention to it through his Twitter page. And, yes, his name really is Pecker—you can’t make this stuff up.
Titled, “No thank you, Mr. Pecker,” Bezos blasted everything from his initial scandalous texts to emails between Pecker and his attorney to full descriptions of the alleged photos between Bezos and Sanchez. He ended the piece with a mic-dropping statement:
“These communications cement AMI’s long-earned reputation for 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 has decided to use his powerful leadership position for good, stating that “if in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”
Read the full post here.
(Source: Medium)
