Jeff Bezos takes extraordinarily brave step

The public row between the owners of the National Enquirer and Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man and owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, has become the most talked-about story in Washington. Bezos who grew Amazon from a workshop in a garage to the multi-billion dollar company it is today has done something which few men or women in public high-profile life would dare to do. Instead of taking the easy option and giving in to the demands of the National Enquirer's lawyers he has faced up to them and revealed what he has called the blackmail attempts to shut him up. It's a bizarre and excrutiatingly intimate tussle between two giants of the newspaper industry. American Media Inc (AMI), the owner of the National Enquirer, a newspaper which has made a mint out of publishing scandalous revelations, gave Bezos an ultimatum: stop investigating who leaked all his intimate texts with his lover and publicly state that the National Enquiry's story about Bezos's affair was not politically motivated, OR highly salacious photographs, presumably sent as a text, would be made public. One at least shows Bezos in full-frontal nude. We know that because Bezos has said so. Wary of writing anything that might attract lawyers' attentions I will only say that such an ultimatum, written by the way by a legal adviser to AMI, is pretty outrageous. Disgraceful in fact. Bezos, already smarting from the knowledge that the National Enquirer had somehow managed to uncover his love affair AND get hold of all his texts and photos, clearly had to make a quick decision. Let them publish and be damned or surrender and promise to say and do nothing other than put out a statement saying how nice and pure AMI is in its journalistic endeavours. The owner of the National Enquirer, one David Pecker, is a strong supporter of Donald Trump. Bezos is Trump's bete-noire. Ergo......! Bezos refused to do any such thing. Instead he published in a blog post everything that had gone between him and AMI, including all the details about the photos. Talk about fronting up with the AMI legal boys! Good for him I say and very brave and very very embarrassing for him and his new lady friend. Bezos announced he and his wife were divorcing just before the National Enquirer came out with its story of the love affair. The AMI lawyers and Mr Pecker must have been taken aback by Bezos's effrontery. Whatever happens next, hopefully no one, not even readers of the National Enquirer, actually want to see pictures of Bezos in the nude. It's a foolish thing for him to have done. Surely he knows that anything sent by text, however well decrypted, is vulnerable to hacking. But no one cares what he looks like in the buff and I can't imagine that any newspaper publisher would put such pictures on their front pages. So it's definitely 40-30 to Bezos in this first game.