The Bezos scandal
A billionaire unbowed
Having built a $780bn business empire from scratch, Jeff Bezos can be no stranger to roller-coaster moments, said The Australian. But nothing can have prepared the world’s richest man for the drama that has upended his personal life in the past month, and put the previously publicity-averse Amazon founder on the front page of newspapers all over the world. Involving an affair, a divorce, intimate text messages, naked selfies, allegations of blackmail, and suggestions of political involvement from the White House to the palaces of the Saudi royal family, it’s a story that even a tabloid would struggle to make up.
It all started in January, when Bezos announced that he had split up with his wife of 25 years. The marriage, he said, had ended amicably; but the next day, the National Enquirer ran an 11-page story detailing the affair that Bezos had been having with former Fox presenter Lauren Sánchez. In Washington, one man could not conceal his glee. Donald Trump has long had it in for Bezos, said Tom Leonard in the Daily Mail. On Twitter, he has been attacking Amazon for years. Few, however, believe that Bezos’s business practices are the US president’s real beef: some think Trump is jealous of Bezos’s vast wealth; others say his enmity stems from Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post – a leading representative of what Trump calls the “fake news media”. Either way, he was quick publicly to rejoice in Bezos’s difficulties. “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper,” he crowed on Twitter.
But his gloating was premature – because the billionaire fought back, said The Independent. Bemused at how the Trumpsupporting Enquirer had obtained not only details of his affair, but also intimate text messages he had sent his lover – “I want to smell you, I want to breathe you in...” – Bezos put his security chief on the trail. Gavin de Becker reported back that the story had been “politically motivated”, a claim that was sure to hit a nerve. David Pecker, the CEO of the Enquirer’s owner, American Media, Inc. (AMI), is an old friend of Trump’s, and the tabloid not only endorsed Trump in the run-up to the US election, it also buried negative stories about him. In particular, the Enquirer bought exclusive rights to a Playboy model’s account of her alleged affair with Trump, and then spiked it, a tactic known as “catch and kill”. Pecker has gained immunity from prosecution over this by cooperating with the investigation into Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. It has been speculated that it was to regain favour with Trump that the Enquirer ran the story on Bezos.
As for the source of the texts, fingers have been pointed at Sánchez’s brother Michael – an ardent Trump fan with ties to two Trump associates, Roger Stone and Carter Page. (Sánchez denies being the source of the leak.) But de Becker has also suggested the involvement of a “government entity” – prompting claims of a Saudi connection, said Vanity Fair. AMI is keen to do business in Saudi Arabia; Trump has close ties with the Saudis; and Bezos’s Washington Post has bitterly criticised the Saudis over the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi. (As Bezos recently put it, his ownership of the paper is a “complexifier” for him.) Whatever the truth, Pecker was said to be “apoplectic” that the tables had been turned against the tabloid, said David Smith in The Observer. Its editor reportedly wrote to Bezos suggesting that unless he publicly stated that he had no evidence that the story was politically motivated, it would publish more of the material it had obtained about his affair – including explicit “below the belt” selfies that he’d sent Sánchez.
Threatened with something that looked like blackmail, said Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times, Bezos built on the tactic made famous by the Duke of Wellington: in 1824, he famously told his blackmailer to “publish and be damned”. In a bombshell blog post entitled “No thank you, Mr Pecker”, Bezos detailed AMI’S attempts to strong-arm him (“Bezos Exposes Pecker”, read a subsequent headline) – and insisted he’d not be giving into it. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion,” he wrote, “how many people can?” And so a billionaire known for his ruthless business practices and alleged mistreatment of low-paid staff found himself on the side of the angels. In the US, (according to one study) 88% of the adult population has sent a “sext” message – and “sextortion” is a growing menace, said Dan Savage in The New York Times. Bezos’s next move should be to publish his naked selfies himself, to normalise what is already normal – and so protect from future blackmail and embarrassment all the young adults who have been sending out nude photos of themselves since they got their first phones. For Bezos, that would be quite a legacy – a far “better one than wage theft”.
“Bezos built on the tactic made famous by the Duke of Wellington: ‘publish and be damned’”