The tabloid-like feud between American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is full of operatically tangled relationships. Most famously and perhaps most consequentially is the long friendship and tabloid-wingman relationship AMI chief David Pecker has with President Trump, a vocal antagonist of Bezos and his companies. Also friendly with Pecker (and Roger Stone) is Michael Sanchez, a pro-Trump Hollywood agent and brother of Lauren Sanchez, whose romantic entanglement with Bezos was exposed by the Enquirer, apparently precipitating the end of Bezos' marriage.
Saudi Arabia — with close ties to Trump and evidently AMI and antipathy toward Bezos' Washington Post — may have played a role in pilfering his text messages and intimate photos to Sanchez, Bezos suggested in Thursday night's post outlining what he describes as AMI's "extortion and blackmail" to get him to drop his investigation into the theft. But there's also a subplot involving Jon Fine, AMI's deputy general counsel, whose emails laying out the terms of AMI's demands were included in Bezos' post. Before he joined AMI last November, Fine spent nearly a decade as an executive at Amazon, working under Bezos from 2006 to 2015, according to his LinkedIn page.
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