Blackmail, bluff and Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is at the centre of an unfolding story that places a lurid spotlight on the intersection of power, politics and sex in the US.

Jeff Bezos, right, with lover Lauren Sanchez and her then husband Patrick Whitesell in 2016. Picture: Getty Images

Jeff Bezos is no stranger to dramatic change, having built his $US780 billion ($1.1 trillion) ­Amazon empire from scratch.

But nothing could have prepared the world’s richest man for the tabloid tsunami that has upturne­d his life in the past month.

Bezos is at the centre of an unfolding story that has placed a lurid spotlight on the intersection of power, politics, sex and wealth in America. The man who once portraye­d himself as a private, homespun businessman who drove cheap cars and washed the dishes at home, and who also owns The Washington Post, has become front-page news for all the wrong reasons.

But even Bezos, whose personal worth is estimated at $US130bn, would struggle to deny that this story has everything: an affair, a divorce, a billionaire, saucy text messages between lovers, naked photos, a tabloid expose, claims of extortion and accusations of polit­ical motivation that go all the way up to US President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia’s royal palace.

As federal prosecutors untangle this saga to see if anyone has broken the law, Bezos and the tabloid magazine that broke the story, National Enquirer, have recruite­d an army of lawyers to ensur­e their version of history prevail­s.

“Of course I don’t want person­al photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, polit­ical favours, political attacks and corruption,” Bezos wrote of ­National Enquirer. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”

In truth, the magazine lifted the first lid in this secret affair. Bezos was told on January 7 that ­National Enquirer was about to ­reveal he was having an affair with Lauren Sanchez, 49, a former host of the Fox show So You Think You Can Dance.

Two days later, Bezos tweeted that he and his wife of 25 years, novelist MacKenzie Bezos, with whom he has four children, were divorcing.

Bezos and wife MacKenzie, who announced their separation last month.

The billionaire had smelt a rat. National Enquirer’s parent compan­y, American Media Inc, is run by David Pecker, a close friend of Trump. The magazine is staunchly pro-Trump, backing him from the moment he ran for president. Nationa­l Enquirer has been involve­d in “catch and kill” deals to purchase and then kill stories that would be harmful to him.

The magazine has admitted to prosecutors it paid $US150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to suppres­s her claims of an affair with Trump.

The President has had a high-profile public feud with Bezos over critical coverage of his presidency by The Washington Post. Trump refers to the paper as “the Amazon Post”. After National Enquirer published its expose, Trump tweeted: “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor.”

Bezos appears to believe the story was politically motivated, while the magazine argues it was just a cracker yarn that would see the edition fly off the shelves.

The story began last year when Bezos started his relationship with Sanchez after they met though her then husband, Patrick Whitesell, who runs a major talent agency in Hollywood.

Bezos had been spending more time in Los Angeles as Amazon expand­ed its investment in entertainment, an area that fascinated him. The once reclusive Bezos started being photographed alongside movie stars, producers and directors, attending red-carpe­t events and award shows.

Bezos and Sanchez became close while working together on a documentary about the billionaire’s spaceflight company, Blue Origin. National Enquirer received a tip-off and its reporters trailed them to hotels and restaurants.

The magazine later claimed to have followed the couple “across five states and 40,000 miles”, ­including at “their beachfront love nest in Santa Monica”. The most explosive part of the expose is “sleazy texts messages and ­gushing love notes” between the couple. “I am crazy about you, all of you,’’ Bezos writes in one message. In another, he says: “I want to smell you, I want to breathe you in. I want to hold you tight.”

National Enquirer published a 12-page spread on the affair, prompting Bezos to direct a team of investigators to uncover how it obtained his messages. The investigators soon focused on his mistress’s brother, Michael Sanchez, a Californian talent manager and fervent Trump supporter who recentl­y tweeted that the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller was “an out-of-control witch-hunt”.

“Muellerism = McCarthyism,” he wrote in another tweet.

The front page of National Enquirer featuring the Bezos divorce.

Sanchez has ties to Trump asso­c­iates such as Roger Stone and Carter Page. Stone, who has been indicted by Mueller, says Sanchez is “a very good guy”.

Sanchez denies he is the source of the leaked messages, even though the lawyer for Pecker, Elkan Abramowitz, has hinted at his involvement, saying the source “was well known to both Mr Bezos and Ms Sanchez”.

The big twist in the controversy emerged late last week when Bezos published an extraordinary online post under the headline “No thank you, Mr Pecker”.

“Something unusual happened to me yesterday,” Bezos wrote. “Actually, for me it wasn’t just unusu­al  —  it was a first. I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

“Or at least that’s what the top people at the National Enquirer thought. I’m glad they thought that, because­ it emboldened them to put it all in writing. Rather than capitulate to extorti­on and blackmail, I’ve decid­ed to publish exact­ly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.”

The New York Post’s coverage of the Bezos message to David Pecker, who runs National Enquirer’s parent compan­y, American Media

Bezos accused National Enquirer of extortion and blackmail by threatening to publish intimate pictures of him unless he agreed to state publicly that the magazine was not motivated by politics when it revealed his affair.

He says National Enquirer demand­ed he make a statement that he had “no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influen­ced by political forces”.

Bezos revealed emails from top National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard to his lawyers. Howard, an Australian, is a former sports reporter for the Seven Network in Melbourne. Described by former colleagues as ruthless, charming and ambitious, he moved to New York in 2008 to try his luck in entertainm­ent reporting, rising quickly to assume a key position at National Enquirer.

“I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our news gathering,” Howard wrote to Bezos’s lawyers, adding that one of the images was a “below the belt selfie — otherwise colloquially known as a ‘dick pic’ ”. “It would give no editor pleasure to send this email. I hope common sense can prevail — and quickly,” he wrote.

Bezos said in his online post: “Well that got my attention.” He decided he preferred to endure the embarrassment of the publication of the photos than submit to what he described as ­extortion.

“Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here,” Bezos wrote. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?

“These communications cement AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponising journalistic ­priv­il­eges, hiding behind ­important protections, and ignoring the ­tenets and purpose of true journalism.”

Bezos and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, have suggested that National Enquirer’s attack was politically motivated, noting Trump’s hostility to the billionaire and The Washington Post, which is highly critical of the President.

Bezos’s security consultant, Gavin de Becker. Picture: Getty Images

Bezos describes the Post as a “complexifier” for someone in his position. He says it is “unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy. President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets.”

Bezos makes the conspiratorial claim that Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the magazine’s ­expose. “The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder­ of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpop­ular in certain circles,” he wrote.

Last year AMI paid for and produce­d a 100-page glossy magazine called The New Kingdom, which praised Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ahead of his visit to the US. The magazine had no advertisements, fuelling speculation that Saudi Arabia was helping to fund the publication.

US intelligence agencies conclude­d that the crown prince was responsible for ordering the murder in Turkey of Khashoggi, a Post columnist and critic of Moham­med. The Post has been highly critical of the Saudi Arabian regime ever since.

However, Bezos offered no evidence to back up his claim.

In recent days AMI has pushed back on Bezos’s allegations.

“It absolutely is not extortion and not blackmail,” says AMI’s lawyer Abramowitz.

He says Bezos and AMI “had interests in resolving their ­differences”.

“Bezos didn’t want another story written about him or those pictures published, AMI did not want to have the libel against them that this was inspired by the White House, inspired by Saudi Arabia or inspired by The Washington Post.”

Another AMI lawyer, Jon Fine, says the company “emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporti­ng was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise­. Simply put, this was, and is, a news story.”

Federal prosecutors are looking into whether AMI broke the law and therefore violated a previou­s agreement it struck with them in September as part of the investigation into hush money paid to McDougal.

Trump’s former lawyer Mich­ael Cohen testified that he asked AMI to pay McDougal to win her silence, at the direction of Trump, to protect his election prospects.

Although prosecutors concluded the AMI payment was illegal, they did not press charges because the company co-operated with them.

But under the deal AMI agreed to “commit no crimes whatsoever” for the next three years, or the company would be “subject to ­prosecution for any federal crimin­al violation of which this offic­e has knowledge”.

In other words, if AMI is found to have broken the law in its conduc­t with Bezos, the company and Pecker could be liable for prosecution for campaign finance violations over the payment to McDougal.

Bezos and AMI have both been wounded by the story.

The Amazon founder seems especiall­y sensit­ive to media fascin­ation with his affair.

He says AMI claimed the story was newsworthy because it thought it was “necessary to show Amazon shareholders that my business judgment is terrible”.

“I founded Amazon in my garag­e 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office mysel­f,” he wrote. “Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world. I will let those results speak for themselves.’

When The Wall Street Journal asked to interview Bezos about the story, Amazon spokesman Jay Carney shot back: “I didn’t realise The Wall Street Journal trafficked in warmed-over drivel from supermarket tabloids.”

But no matter what Bezos thinks about what constitutes news, the fallout from this story continues to generate headlines, including, most prominently of all, on the front page of the Post.