Bezos’s blackmail charge shows feud with Trump
PRIVATE PHOTOS, TEXTS Amazon CEO says AMI has been trying to extort him
WASHINGTON: A long-simmering feud between Donald Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took a bizarre turn after the multibillionaire accused allies of the US president of brazenly trying to extort him.
In a surprising move that lit up social media feeds worldwide, the Amazon founder published a blog post on Thursday, alleging that the publisher of the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him with embarrassing photos of Bezos and a woman who wasn’t his wife - including sexually charged selfies.
The usually media-shy executive also published explicit email exchanges and descriptions of the photos, saying he would rather be embarrassed than extorted.
He also pointed to reports that the Enquirer’s publisher - American Media (AMI) CEO David Pecker - has worked before on behalf of the US president.
Pecker, Bezos said in his post, “recently entered into an immunity deal with the department of justice related to their role in the so-called ‘Catch and Kill’ process on behalf of Trump and his election campaign”.
Trump in turn has frequently criticised Bezos and his newspaper, The Washington Post, for everything from taxes and shipping fees to printing “fake news”. On Twitter last month, Trump called the tech executive “Jeff Bozo”.
“It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy,” Bezos said in his post. “President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets.”
Representatives of AMI and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ironically, becoming a Trump nemesis doesn’t seem to have hurt the Amazon founder’s for- tunes.
Since Trump’s election, no one has made more money than Bezos, who became the world’s richest person thanks to a gold rush of e-commerce, web advertising and cloud computing.
Bezos’s wealth currently is valued at $133.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.