A Turning Point for Sextortion
On the evening of February 7, Jeff Bezos announced that he had been sextorted.
The Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner didn’t use the term in his bombshell Medium post, in which he accused the National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc., of blackmailing him with “intimate photos” that he had taken of himself. As Bezos describes it, AMI threatened to publish the photos if Bezos failed to make a public statement that he had “no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”
It’s not clear what entity AMI worried would make that statement—Bezos or the Post—and it’s even less clear precisely what information was at risk of being made public. But despite these missing details, the outlines of Bezos’s predicament fit a pattern that has become unfortunately recognizable over the past few years.
[Read: Why do smart people send nudes?]
“Sextortion,” as it’s come to be known within federal law-enforcement agencies, describes a situation in which the perpetrator somehow obtains sexual material concerning
