Jeff Bezos, pants unknown. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
Let’s not get too cute about it. Lawyers for American Media Inc., parent company of the National Enquirer, attempted to extort Amazon founder Jeff Bezos by publishing his dick pics unless Bezos agreed to make the Washington Post back off its coverage of Saudi connections with the magazine, and a release of claims the Post might have against the Enquirer. Jeff Bezos published the letters he received from AMI. Amazingly, AMI lays out in detail the nature of its threat:
However, in the interests of expediating [sic/lol] this situation, and with The Washington Post poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of The National Enquirer’s initial report, I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our newsgathering.
By any dictionary definition of extortion, this is it. Do what we want or we’ll show people your dick. That’s not right. You don’t threaten another man’s dick. That’s just the rules.
We have extortion by any common-sense definition of the term, but do we have “criminal extortion” on the part of AMI? That’s a more difficult question. I imagine the difficulty in proving the crime of extortion is one reason Jeff Bezos is pulling his KEYSER SOZE move on a post on Medium instead of a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York.
Renato Mariotti has the credited thread on this issue. In pertinent part:
12/ AMI would surely argue that this is a legitimate settlement of its dispute with Bezos. They realize that Bezos has claims against them, and perhaps they could make claims against Bezos or the Washington Post. The agreement would release those claims.
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) February 8, 2019
If Bezos files a complaint, AMI could certainly argue that this is a legitimate settlement offer. A bad faith, brazen, dickish, but legal settlement offer.
Lawyers contemplate all kinds of threats during settlement negotiations. Many of the letters that fly back and forth during those negotiations would look like “extortion” to the untrained eye. Hell, our criminal justice system is primarily based on prosecutors extorting plea agreements from defendants through a series of threats and intimidation. “Plea to Murder 2 or else WE WILL TRY TO KILL YOU!” = “Extortion” in any fair meaning of the term.
What’s the line between “negotiations” and “extortion”? Nobody really knows. You’d think this was an area of law we’d want to make really clear, but nah. We want to assume “good faith” among legal counsel, even when they manifestly and repeatedly engage in bad faith negotiations. The law favors “settlement” and you can’t get settlements without threatening to cut off your opponent’s balls, I guess.
I think Bezos has a criminal extortion case, because I think AMI’s best possible defense is trash. For a settlement offer to be legitimate, you have to be offering to not do something you legitimately could do. You couldn’t say “release all claims against me, or else I’ll kill your dog,” because you can’t legitimately kill someone’s dog (cc: Roger Stone).
Here, AMI would argue that it could legitimately publish Jeff Bezos’s dick pics because Jeff Bezos dick is “news” and AMI has a strong First Amendment right to publish what it considers news. First Amendment lawyers are unlikely to agree with me here, but I think Bezos’s dick pics are less “news” and more “revenge porn.”
Consider: The National Enquirer already effectively ruined Jeff Bezos’s marriage (well, check that, Jeff Bezos already ruined his own marriage by having an affair that the National Enquirer caught wind of). They’ve already put the sexts out there. His wife has already left him. The news that Jeff Bezos stepped out on his wife is already well established.
Their settlement offer wasn’t “release all claims or we will publish news that will ruin your marriage.” It was “release all claims or we will embarrass you with images illegally stolen from you that we just so happen to innocently possess.” There’s the explicit threat that they will publish these embarrassing images, and the implicit threat that should they come across any other images illegally obtained — through no fault of their own, allegedly — they’ll publish those as well. Publishing stolen material, just to embarrass somebody you don’t like, isn’t “news” and doesn’t deserve the solemn First Amendment protections given to “news.”
I mean, I’m old enough to remember when Gawker existed. If publishing video of somebody having sex, video that you know or should know was stolen, just to say “hey, let’s look at this guy having sex” is wrong, then threatening to do almost the same thing strikes me as an illegitimate settlement offer.
But I’m just a guy who doesn’t publish dick pics for a living. A criminal extortion case would be tough to make. Who knows how many times AMI lawyers have used these tactics? It’ll take more than a billionaire acting in IDGAF mode to make them stop.
No thank you, Mr. Pecker [Jeff Bezos]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.
This Is Why It Pays To Have Lawyers Do The Extortion Thing For You curated from Above the Law
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