Clamorous revelation by Jeff Bezos, which risks making the clash with US President Donald Trump increasingly heated. The founder and CEO of Amazon, as well as editor of the Washington Post, a newspaper hostile to the White House since the days of the electoral campaign, has in fact denounced being the subject of "blackmail" and an "extortion attempt" by the National Enquirer, the tabloid tabloid controlled by American Media Inc (AMI) owned by David Pecker, an ally and longtime friend of the tycoon. “No thank you, Mr Pecker”, is the title of the post that Bezos he posted on his blog to make the story public: “Yesterday an unusual thing happened to me – writes the richest man in the world and now increasingly Trump's bitter rival -, I was made an offer which I could not refuse. They wanted me to make a false statement to the press, but I didn't give in to the blackmail."
Bezos also provided the evidence, attaching the emails received in the long post of complaint. The letters received by the National Enquirer leave no doubts: the diffusion of embarrassing photos of Mr. Amazon and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, a former television journalist, is threatened. Personal photos exchanged via sms between Bezos and Sanchez, some of which would portray him completely naked. The reason for the threat clearly emerges from one of the emails sent by Ami's lawyer to one of Bezos' closest collaborators: he is asked to stop the investigations launched by the owner of Amazon to find out how the National Enquirer obtained personal messages and photos in the service in which the tabloid revealed the relationship with Sanchez. Creating quite a few inconveniences from the point of view of the image since Bezos is divorcing his wife MacKenzie. Specifically, Bezos was asked to "use common sense" and to publicly declare that he has no elements in hand to say that the National Enquirer scoop hides political motivations. Blackmail, in fact, to which the manager did not, however, give in by revealing everything.
And in fact, for the first time, pointing the finger directly at Donald Trump: “My ownership of the Washington Post is a very complicated thing. It is inevitable – Bezos wrote again – that certain powerful people who are covered by the newspaper think that I am their enemy. And President Trump is one such person, as is obvious from his many tweets”. Bezos in the post takes aim not only at the past cooperation between Ami and the tycoon, but also at the well-known connections between the editorial group and the government of Saudi Arabia, in the crosshairs for the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, an episode on which the capital's newspaper investigates relentlessly to get to the truth. “Of course I don't want personal photos to be published but I also don't want to participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks and corruption,” Bezos then writes, explaining that however complicated it is to own a newspaper like the Washington Post, he regrets his investment in a “fundamental institution that has a fundamental mission”: the truth.
