What do Jeff Bezos and the Duke of Wellington have in common? The phrase “publish and be damned!” comes to mind.
Just today, Jeff Bezos posted to Medium an account of National Enquirer publisher David Pecker attempting to blackmail him. According to the emails Bezos reposted, Pecker threatened publication of embarrassing photos of himself and his girlfriend, TV anchor Lauren Sanchez, if Bezos didn’t back off on the Washington Post‘s investigation of external political influence on the Enquirer‘s actions. (During the Trump campaign, the Enquirer practiced a “catch-and-kill” process whereby it would buy and then kill news stories detrimental to Donald Trump.)
The National Enquirer, it should be noted, also published a trove of racy private texts between Bezos and Sanchez (link via archive.org to avoid giving the Enquirer additonal traffic) in January, and presumably those photos were obtained from the same source. (It’s unclear just how much involvement the Enquirer may have played in the estrangement of Bezos and his wife Mackenzie that led to the announcement of their divorce in January.)
Bezos wasn’t having any of it. He writes, “Any personal embarrassment [the Enquirer‘s publisher] could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?” So he published all the emails, laying out the sordid details of what they wanted in return for their agreement not to publish the embarrassing photos.
And that’s what brings to mind the Duke of Wellington, who was approached by a blackmailer threatening to publish a courtesan’s memoir containing racy details about his affairs with her if he didn’t pay to have himself removed from it. The Duke’s reaction was much the same as Bezos’s: the angry response “Publish and be damned.” The blackmailer did, but in the end it didn’t hurt Wellington’s reputation much—he didn’t lose his position, and eventually went on to become prime minister.
It looks like Bezos is taking a page from that same book—including outright pre-empting the Enquirer by revealing exactly what the pictures would include. Even if the Enquirer does publish them, Bezos sharing the details about them first robs them of at least some of their sting.
And I think it’s great that Bezos is willing to stand up for journalistic integrity, even at the potential cost of his own embarrassment. He emphasizes his strong belief in the Washington Post‘s mission, and his intention to stand behind it to the end:
Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.
Jeff has certainly set the cat among the pigeons with this response, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens next.
teleread.org 
I just read Bezos’s Medium piece. It shows that Pecker (or his lawyer) doesn’t understand who he’s dealing with.
Bezos indicates (correctly) that AMI doesn’t have the right to publish the photos because they are Bezos’s copyrights. AMI’s purported reason for publishing them anyway is because they are “newsworthy” — as evidence that Bezos lacks business judgment — and therefore covered under fair use.
This is a risible fair use claim. AMI knows from long experience that such a claim has to be fought in court, which means that a) the nature (if not the substance) of the salacious material will come to light in public filings, and b) that the victim will have to pay for lawyers to fight it. In the usual case, these are enough to make the victim cave.
But this is not the usual case. In publishing AMI’s descriptions of the photos in a highly visible outlet, Bezos has already done a), thereby blunting the impact if AMI puts descriptions of the photos in a court filing. And as to b), hardy har har. Bezos has also suggested his next course of action if Pecker doesn’t stand down: countersuing Pecker and AMI for blackmail and extortion. And he’s laid out the evidence to establish the basis for the claim, right there in that Medium piece. He’s even dropped hints that he knows several other people who have fallen victim to this kind of scheme from AMI and might consider funding their countersuits or even bringing a class action, which could ruin AMI. And to top it all off, he’s done it in a way that has drawn sympathy from the (AMI-hating) MSM, e.g., front page on today’s NY Times.
In other words, this is a masterpiece of jiu-jitsu by Bezos (and whatever lawyer was advising him). Pecker would be foolish to pursue this further, and if he does, it just shows how desperate he is to hide whatever the investigations are going to find.
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Chris, you’re missing the main point of this, which certainly isn’t Bezos as a champion of journalistic integrity. He’s the richest man on the planet, and yet he’s treating the reporters at the Washington Post little better than he does the contracted staff at his warehouses. Just ask them.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/washington-post-employees-call-owner-jeff-bezos-papers-pay-benefits-open-letter/
The real point is that the guy has less sense than a house fly, which can at least manage to avoid a fly swatter. He made these pictures of his private parts. He released them from his personal control. And now he is making a major public issue about the possibility of a tabloid publishing them. That is idiocy beyond belief. Even Barbara Streisand’s behavior, blundering as it was, at least demonstrated that she had a sensible desire for her personal privacy. There was nothing inherently scandalous about the aerial picture of her home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
And what’s Bezos’s rationale for creating this fuss? That he has a copyright on those pictures? Sorry, but the moment he made those pictures a news story, he created a fair use rationale for the National Enquirer to publish them. Journalism is a stated reason for fair use.
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In recent months, I’ve been wondering what happened to turn some corporate executives into such idiots. We saw that with Starbucks and a policy that anybody can use their restrooms, even if they leave them unusable after. More recently, we saw that with Gillette’s man-bashing ad. Those at least could be explained as corporate executives virtual-signaling their peers and forgetting their business sense. Here’s a parody of the Gillette one. It has a million-plus views. That’s not how you sell razors to men.
But the folly of Jeff Bezos is on a wholly different plane. This isn’t virtue-signaling. The only message it sends is that he’s an idiot, that the richest man in the world is also the most foolish, from his picture-taking to his publicity-making.
And what is the end result of this? Behind those pictures lies behavior that has led to a divorce settlement that’ll cost him about $60 billion. That’s billion with a b.
I fail to understand why you feel a need to pander to him. Yes, he is in big trouble. But it is trouble of his own making.
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Mike, I agree with Chris and Bill. While I certainly would part company with Jeff Bezos on many other matters, I consider him a true hero here. He valued the national good more than he did his privacy.
Like Fox on most occasions, the National Enquirer is part of the Trump propaganda machine. Worst, like our aspiring dictator, the Enquirer resorts to Mafia-style tactics. If the world’s richest man can’t or won’t stand up to these thugs, then who will be able to? Of course, I would rather that Bezos not have strayed from his wife, but that’s a separate issue — just like the others you mention.
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To be clear: I am not calling Jeff Bezos a hero. Nor am I calling him a villain. I am simply offering the observation that his legal and PR strategy was brilliant here.
Pecker is playing in a different sandbox than the one he’s used to here, one in which he doesn’t own the pail and shovel. Bezos is telling Pecker to Go Ahead and Make His Day. He’s made it clear to Pecker that if pursues this further, he’ll torch Pecker and his company into the ground. He also understands that he’s operating in a media environment where someone who sleeps with porn stars and brags about sexual assault gets elected President – thanks in part to Mr. David Pecker. (I am perhaps suggesting that Pecker is a lowlife scumbag who I hope will get what he deserves.)
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I think Jeff Bezos has already paid the price for loss of privacy, so AMI really can’t do much more to him. So the Streisand effect really doesn’t apply here. Anyway, the relevant issue is the extortion issue (and possibly the copyright issue), not the free press issue.
But even those who might disdain his extramarital behavior recognize now he is the wronged party. And I don’t see how this is NOT a violation of the agreement AMI made with the Special Prosecutor.
I’m not a fan of Amazon’s monopolistic tendencies, but a company like AIM is naive if it believes that Amazon won’t interfere with its ability to sell its publications.
I occasionally peeked at the National Enquirer because its scandal reporting was generally reliable — well vetted and had no political agenda. (Yes, it did seem to focus more on Republican than Dem scandals, but not majorly so). That changed right before the Trump campaign — or maybe I just didn’t pay close enough attention to notice it.
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I would point out that the reason AMI threatened Bezos was that they wanted his investigators to stop trying to determine how AMI got their hands on the pictures. Fair use has no bearing on that question. The pictures had no inherent journalistic value at the time AMI acquired them, so if AMI broke the law getting the pictures, that’s a big problem for them. You can’t get the pictures illegally, turn them into a story and then claim journalistic fair use.
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Bingo. That’s exactly why I called AMI’s fair use claim “risible.” But it’s a claim that you can throw out there and make someone spend money on lawyers to defend in court. The copyright argument doesn’t come up in the more usual AMI case of paparazzi selling pics to them, so they had to invent some b.s. argument about why it’s not copyright infringement.
Of course, Pecker is worried that the investigation is going to find that AMI itself was the source or instigator of the leaks. That would be a worst case outcome for him and his company.
Like I said, Pecker just has no concept of who he’s up against.
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