I would pay $50 to unlearn that Jeff Bezos once called girlfriend Lauren Sanchez his “alive girl” in a sext. The National Enquirer allegedly paid $200,000 to put that information in front of me. By the transitive property, The National Enquirer owes me $150,000. I don’t make the rules.
Indeed, according to The Wall Street Journal, the tabloid paid Lauren Sanchez’s Trump-loving brother Michael the aforementioned $200,000 sum in October, in exchange for Lauren Sanchez’s dirty (or, at the very least, disgusting) texts with Bezos. They published the texts—one of which included the line, “I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon,” why—in an 11-page spread in January.
For those of you who were lucky enough to scrub this information from your frontal cortex, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker also threatened to publish Bezos’s dick pics. That prompted Bezos to put up a statement on Medium telling Pecker to go fuck himself, one small act of heroism in a national moment of upheaval.
Apparently, Pecker wasn’t even sure he wanted to go public with Bezos’s sexts. Per the WSJ:
As the tabloid publisher began negotiations to buy the materials from Mr. Sanchez in October, Mr. Pecker expressed reservations about publishing a story, the people familiar with the matter said. He was concerned Mr. Bezos would sue, forcing debt-laden American Media to expend resources to defend itself for a story executives believed was unlikely to sell well on newsstands. While breaking a story about Mr. Bezos’ affair would burnish the Enquirer’s reputation for breaking news, its readers are historically more interested in showbiz celebrity scandals.
And:
The pursuit of the Bezos story came in a period of financial strain for the company. Efforts to refinance over $400 million in debt in the early fall were jeopardized when an underwriter backed out in the wake of America Media’s legal entanglement in the hush-money case, said a person familiar with the company’s finances. The outcome of the crucial refinancing remained uncertain as Mr. Pecker weighed whether to proceed with the explosive story.
Anyway, in the end the National Enquirer lost $200,000, Bezos lost his marriage and I lost my ability to look at turtles without dry-heaving, so there are no winners in this story.