Jeff Bezos Can Sue the Pants Off the National Enquirer
LAW AND ORDER
A lawsuit could change the way we think about privacy in the digital age.
By JOHN CULHANE February 08, 2019
John Culhane is distinguished professor of law at Delaware Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional and family law.
he impending divorce of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos would have been a tabloid trash fire in any case. When $140 billion (give or take) is at stake, its impossible to imagine the messy proceedings staying private.
But the recent, explosive confrontation between Bezos and the National Enquirer has juiced the peep show fascination with the story. Bezos has acted courageously in making public the Enquirers threat to publish humiliating personal photos depicting him and his alleged girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, unless Bezos newspaper, the Washington Post, backs off on its reporting of alleged ties between David Pecker, the CEO of American Media Inc., the Enquirers parent company, and Saudi Arabia. Its a sure bet that prosecutors will take a close look at the tabloids extortionate actions (especially now that New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow has come forward with a claim that AMI threatened to ruin him if he continued writing about the companys connection to Donald Trump.) But Bezos can and should do more. He should sue the Enquirer and AMI for violating his privacy. Hes got the funds to bury them in litigationand hed probably win.
It mighty seem late in the day to be complaining about our collective loss of privacy, or to suggest that anything can be done to push back against it. The dominance of social media has so compromised our personal lives that it can be challenging perhaps even a little strange to think that there are still limits to what can be put out there without legal consequence. Past relationships that have ended badly are fodder for revenge porn, a horrid genre that mostly goes unchecked, and results in little accountability by authorities. Facebook has spread our information like a thick layer of vegemite, without anything that resembles true consent. And lets face it we can find anyone were looking for in minutes.
But privacy is not quite dead. For egregious cases, there are remedies lying ready to hand in the civil law of torts, at least for the case that Bezos might want to bring against AMI. Tort comes from the French word for wrong, and constitutes a vast umbrella of protection, under state law, for those injured by the careless or intentionally bad actions of others. Most claims are for personal injury (auto accidents, medical malpractice, harms caused by defective products, and so on), but the law also protects against affronts to reputation and dignity.
More:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/08/jeff-bezos-national-enquirer-pecker-ami-photos-224932
duforsure
(11,885 posts)Can't he sue trump for lots of money in civil court also? Is this a pattern trump and pecker have used numbers of times , and stone also?They running extortion and blackmail rings against powerful people they want to weaken, and compromise? Didn't they get Spitzer that way too?
Jarqui
(10,126 posts)They're probably not worth the paper they're printed on.
And he could well sue Trump and maybe Saudi Arabia/MBS who in the Saudi case have lots of money.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)so damaging for AMI. Once a Judge orders a Discovery Notice,then it gets ugly. This will go on for years. Watch AMI hit the Bankruptcy Courts with in weeks.
SunSeeker
(51,571 posts)Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Noticed David Kaye Johnston did a panel this morning. My guess is,he knows the players in this story.
Powerful people can mess one up big time and they will never see it coming. Trump and his Family Crime Syndicate just punched their own ticket.
Mandeville
(35 posts)that bezos wins control of enquirer in a suit and then proceeds to publish nothing but negative stories about chump...like they did to H. it wouldn't be hard to get stories. after a year, he could have a ceremony and burn the fucker to the ground