Jeff Bezos, the digital retail titan and media baron, took to the internet on Thursday evening to defend himself. In a remarkable post on Medium.com, he accused the National Enquirer — the flamethrower-cum-garbage-bin owned by American Media Inc. and overseen by its publisher, David Pecker — of blackmail and extortion.
The Enquirer, you see, recently told Bezos that it had come into possession of several potentially embarrassing photos. The scandal sheet had already published an expose on Bezos’s extramarital affair and that story included private text messages and photos, which spurred him to hire investigators to find out how the Enquirer got its hands on all that stuff.
