It feels like so long ago, but Ronan Farrow broke a very important story adjacent to the larger Trump investigation. Farrow broke the story about how AMI, the National Enquirer and David Pecker worked on “catch-and-kill” stories for Donald Trump. Pecker would authorize the Enquirer to pay Trump’s mistresses for the exclusive rights on their stories, then the Enquirer would refuse to publish the story. Donald Trump then authorized Michael Cohen to pay back Pecker. It’s was a scheme to pay off and silence Trump’s mistresses, and it was all a violation of campaign finance laws. Pecker and Cohen went down – to varying degrees – because of it. Cohen is going to jail, and Pecker reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. WELL after Jeff Bezos was like “here let me publish this blackmail-y email David Pecker just sent me,” Ronan Farrow was like “hey that happened to me too.”
I and at least one other prominent journalist involved in breaking stories about the National Enquirer’s arrangement with Trump fielded similar “stop digging or we’ll ruin you” blackmail efforts from AMI. (I did not engage as I don’t cut deals with subjects of ongoing reporting.) https://t.co/kHQdWIkVjV
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) February 8, 2019
That’s interesting. Now I wonder what AMI possibly dug up on Ronan Farrow, if it was more than an idle threat from them. What’s weird is that AMI probably didn’t even know the extent of the danger Farrow’s reporting would really bring them. Because of Farrow’s reporting and Stormy Daniels’ whole raison d’etre, the arrangements between Pecker and Trump really did get exposed. It might not sound like the biggest story in the grand scheme of all of the treasonous shenanigans, but again: I’m amazed at how often this keeps happening. All of these stories are connected – Ronan Farrow is connected to David Pecker who is connected to Stormy Daniels who is connected to Michael Cohen who is connected to Donald Trump, who ordered David Pecker to continue to punish his perceived enemy, Jeff Bezos, who might have been hacked by Russians for all we f–king now.
And also, AMI had the same kind of secretive collaboration with Harvey Weinstein too, as Farrow points out. All gossip/media/political stories are f–king connected right now.
In light of Bezos’s claims, worth returning to this story we did at @NewYorker, breaking the news that the same Enquirer editor Bezos dealt with was also behind a secret collaboration with Harvey Weinstein to dig up dirt on accusers: https://t.co/lPJM0cPc5n pic.twitter.com/D6jxc88zDl
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) February 8, 2019
Photos courtesy of WENN.
I think this could be the biggest story, by far. It really depends. If it ends up trump has been using the government to read people’s texts and emails, or passing them to the national enquirer, and if he has used info to blackmail senators and congresspeople, and if this involves Saudi/MBS as it appears to…yeah, this will blow everything else out of the water.
Remember that trump used to listen in to phone calls of his famous guests at his hotels. This is nothing new for this guy.
This is going to turn into a raging forest fire and 45 will get burnt badly. I can see more reporters coming forward with stories of attempted blackmail
Maybe I shouldn’t be but I am stunned by how amateur they are. Threatening Bezos with dick pics? Dumb. Sending the threat by an e-mail? WTF!? How did they even think this would work? Bezos could literally have the smallest dick in the world and it wouldn’t change a thing.
It’s more than stupidity. It’s privilege. People like this think that the people they extort and the ones who believe the stories are stupid. The world is your oyster if you are a bully who doesn’t care about anything but keeping yourself and your friends rich and powerful. Women like Melania and Ivanka Trump look away because these men protect them. Same crap, different day. It was revealed because we let a crook into the White House, but this is how a lot of people keep their money and power. Where I grew up, you’d hear stories all the time, and men were constantly working to get laid and deny it. Weird, these rich folks.
I agree with you. What stuns me is not the blackmail. Ronan Farrows Terry Crews etc. are small fish that can be blackmailed easily. Blackmailing Jeff Bezos though? Richest man on earth is gonna fold because of some dick pics? I don’t understand this at all.
This tweet from Terry Crews helps provide context of how they try to blackmail with even false stories. They have no ethics.
https://twitter.com/terrycrews/status/932369292103786496?lang=en
Hopefully Pecker has now violated his plea deal with this. He should go to jail. And don’t forget that Dylan Howard the would be blackmailer who STILL WORKS FOR AMI, helped Harvey Weinstein plant stories about his rape victims. These guys are next level evil, burn them all to the ground.
^ This should serve as a cautionary tale for people too about BLINDLY spreading stories of a certain nature as fact.
I just love Terry so much. I think he’s one of the few celebrities that I’d want to meet who wouldn’t be a disappointment. It makes me so mad that anyone goes after him.
Same here. I remember seeing him post that and I was so angry on his behalf. I can’t imagine being targeted like that, just for speaking up about being assaulted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with him and his partner, Crooked Media founder/former Obama staffer Jon Lovett. Lovett and Ronan have been together for seven or eight years, but it’s only been in the last year or so that they’ve been public and talked about it. Maybe the Enquirer threatened to out Ronan (which is vile, obviously) and he and Jon figured they’d get in front of the story.
Interesting, regardless. Ronan Farrow is our Me Too Avenging Angel!
Eh, I don’t know if that’s blackmailworthy. I was thinking it might have to do with Mia and/or Woody and their family saga.
In any case, good for him for not engaging. They should have known that he wouldn’t, the arrogant fools.
I really hope it’s not something about him and Jon Lovett because I love their relationship. I’ve been listening to so much Lovett or Leave It that when i read Ronan Farrow’s name, I immediately heard Lovett’s voice in my head saying, “Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Ronan Farrow.” I literally cannot think of the man’s name without the description, and I blame Jon Lovett for that. His stories about them are awesome, and it would make me sad if they’re secretly terrible people.
Although, in fairness, I would really prefer no blackmail at all. I want people to keep their not-impacting-people secrets; I don’t like to know too much so long as it’s not about the Trump crime syndicate.
@insertpunhere
Just want to say ..fellow Pod Save America (and Jon L.) fan here! His commentary on Ronan (and Spencer!) always puts a smile on my face
Isn’t the Enquire owned by Rupert Murdoch? Who also owns FOX? Who has a giant boner for the Republican party and anyone associated with the party?
Ps. I’m wrong he owns Star.
Every time I see a photo of Ronan, my first thought is always, “Damn, how did he get Frank’s eyes and nose if he’s not his father? Weird.”
That Woody Allen piece recently quoted him as saying something like, “If he’s not my son, that wouldn’t be fair because I paid child support”. (gross). I wonder if the paternal pretence is actually financially-motivated.
I think he just looks like incredibly similar to his mother. I mean, maybe he’s his father, but I think a lot of the similarities come from her genetics. He has a very similar nose to Mia, and similar eyes. There’s been talk for years that he wears tinted contacts… which I can’t say is a fact, but there’s an awful lot of photos where his eyes are SUPER bright/light blue, while there’s others where they’re a darker more green kind of shade. I know light and editing can do a lot with eyes just from playing around with photography in general… but there’s photos where it looks like he has heterochromia and others where he doesn’t appear to have any. So I think the slightly tinted ‘enhancing’ sort of contacts isn’t something to fully rule out.
At the end of the day… whoever his father is, if I was Ronan, I’d 100% be playing up the characteristics that could pass as Frank’s. It’d be such a good, silent ‘f— you’ to Woody that played against his ego.
He does look so much like Mia but Mia and Frank Sinatra also looked similar, like they could have been siblings. I still think he’s Frank Sinatra’s son, at least I hope so, for Ronan’s sake, because I personally would much rather be Sinatra’s kid than Woody Allen.
I am not the greatest at recognizing facial similarities, but I think RF does resemble Frank. It is more than eye color.
We can all probably agree he does or resemble WA. 😉
Typo = “ not” look like WA.
He got his eyes with contacts. And his nose from his mom’s family. He is lucky enough to look like a Farrow and not an Allen, so he can play this story.
By all accounts, Ronan is the physical reincarnation of his grandfather, Mia’s dad. He sure looks it.
Nat Eq exec: *whispers* i think he might be gay. we got ‘im!
Just a cursory look into AMI shows that it has always been owned and run by the mafia to control narratives and extort powerful politicians and businessmen. Since the Italian mafia was largely rolled up by the Russian mob in the 90s, I assume that Pecker is working for the same boss as Trump–and that would be Semion Mogelivich.
Wiki has this to say about the original creator of The National Enquirer:
“[Generoso] Pope was born on January 13, 1927. His father, Generoso Pope, was a New York political powerbroker and quarry magnate…said to have had ties to New York crime boss Frank Costello.”
A journalist made a great point on Twitter last night. Seems like there’s a good chance AMI has gone after Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. And possibly a bunch of evangelicals. It does seem like the most logical explanation for their unshakable support for Trump.
That and all the shady Russian money that’s bankrolling their campaigns. Scratch a Trump supporter and they bleed rubles.
Evangelical pastors seem to have a penchant for becoming enmired in kinky sex scandals. AMI probably has a bulging file cabinet on all of them. I’d applaud if they took down Franklin Graham.
There’s definitely something on Graham. He changed his tune SOOO quickly after the golf game with Trump, I think Trump was told to let him know they have dirt on him.
I am not exactly proud to confess that I was a regular NE reader for years. It was my guilty escapism pleasure during the 1980s-90s.
One thing I recall is how they seemed to have certain frequent subjects (or targets). Finding out about their tactics explains a lot. Sometimes celebrities would be a topic of salacious stories, then start giving them interviews. Dolly is an example of that.
I truly wonder if we are just at the barely visible tip of the iceberg today.
Wow – There have been whispers for years about Graham’s sexual preferences. Maybe they have pictures or video.
I just admire Ronan farrow a lot, he is a fine talented professional.
Thanks to some wise observer on Twitter, finally made the connection last night to the way Trump went after Hillary Clinton. It was just an extension of his modus operandi with everybody else – looking for dirt, hoping to find something damaging he could use to manipulate, control or destroy her. That’s why he asked Wikileaks to release the Russia-stolen Emails. He assumed they would be just as dirty and damaging as the stuff Pecker locked up for him in the safe of the Enquirer.
Now I want to see how his mid-January tweet attacking Bezos aligns with the Enquirer’s “content” chief emailing Bezos. A content chief who called himself Dildo by the way.
If I ran major supermarkets, I’d stop stocking them. Maybe we need a boycott campaign to get the supermarkets to do this.
Boycotting supermarkets is a great idea. I always forget how much the NE probably influenced so many gullible folks in 2016. It just reinforces everything Fox is telling them. It would be amazing to see this rag diminished in a real way.
“A content chief who called himself Dildo by the way”… thanks for the laughs lol.
Ronan Farrow is stunning. I named my child Ronan, it’s an Irish name that means little or baby seal. The child of the Selkie woman and fisherman myth from The Celts. I’m so happy my child shares the name of this amazing man.
I hadn’t seen Bezos’ blog post before and I had to laugh out loud. He redacted Dylan Howard’s cell number in the first line of the email but left it in on the v-card at the bottom, along with Howard’s office number. Also, his email address in the header and the card wasn’t redacted.
Hope Dylan has been enjoying those emails and phone calls.
I do NOT want to speak too soon, but I’m getting the feeling that this is going to go the same way as the News Of The World phone hacking scandal went, in that we might very well see the National Inquirer get shut down as a result of all of this.
I can’t see them not getting shut down. This is just the tip of the iceberg imo.
We heard that Pecker of the National Enquirer has a vault of info still remaining. I wonder how much dirt the have on Republican politicians who all of a sudden love Trump….
I’m sure if their secrets came out, the number of Republican women elected to office would increase overnight.