A National Emergency

The ongoing National Enquirer scandal took an extremely strange turn last night as Amazon boss Jeff Bezos published an explosive email from the editor of the Enquirer, Dylan Howard, which appears to be a fairly transparent attempt at dick pic blackmail.

It’s not the first time the Enquirer has been accused of high-profile blackmail. In fact, it was accusations that the Enquirer had been trying to put the frighteners on MSNBC’s morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that spurred us on to start looking at the history of the Enquirer and its shady parent company, American Media Inc.

There has honestly never been a better time to put aside an hour or so to read our (now) five-part series on the whole huge fiasco – but here’s a few little other bits to whet your appetite.

It was weird to see Dylan Howard being so coy when describing the leaked pictures they have. Using euphemistic phrases like “below-the-belt selfie”, “semi-erect manhood penetrating the zipper of said garment” or “a glimpse of her nether region” – it just didn’t seem like the Dylan we know.

Dylan (or ‘Dildo’ to his friends) joined the American Media family in 2010. He took a brief hiatus in 2012 to work for Celebuzz, but left a year later amid allegations of sexual harassment – and one of throwing a cock ring at a colleague.

Clearly he feels much more at home at AMI, as he’s suffered no professional consequences at all for being thrown out of at least two Hollywood hotspots for pulling down his jeans and waving his willy about. Nor was he punished for using company time and resources to arrange his 30th birthday party in Vegas, where a call girl came to his hotel room and gave a blowjob to one of his guests in front of the entire party.

Quite how Dylan would choose to describe those incidents in a threatening email, we’ll no doubt find out…

When Dylan Howard was working at Star magazine (another title in the AMI stable), he arranged for one of his friends to fly in from Australia to attend the mag’s lavish Christmas party. In return, he had the friend deliver a “cringe-worthy” and “mortifying” speech to the staff, all about how amazing Dylan is.

It lasted 40 minutes and touched on how talented and smart he was; how he’s the best boss ever; how he’s the best friend you could wish for and how everyone should be grateful to be working for him.

Towards the end of this speech, some people started losing interest and began talking among themselves – which caused Dylan The Wonderboss to fly into a rage, grab the microphone from his friend, and scream “SHUT THE FUCK UP OR GET OUT NOW AND FUCK OFF HOME!”

Bezos really isn’t messing around with this. From the emails he published last night, we see that he’s shelling out for the estimable services of Marty Singer – the lawyer known around Hollywood as ‘Mad Dog Marty’.

Singer’s most legendary success came when arguing a case for Entourage star Jeremy Piven. Piven had pulled out of a Broadway production of Speed The Plow in 2008, four months into his six-month contract – citing mercury poisoning from eating too much sushi.

Initially producers couldn’t understand how Piven could be simultaneously far too sick to perform, yet also well enough to attend the Golden Globe awards and friends’ birthday parties at swanky New York nightclubs – but somehow Singer managed to convince them…

The history of the National Enquirer is a huge, sprawling rabbit hole of a story that takes in sixty years of American history – including the New York Mafia, the DC corridors of power, the tabloid industry of Florida, newspaper strikes, commie witch-hunts, Soviet espionage and much, much more…
[Read the introduction]

PART I/ The Tabloid Triangle

How a botched Mafia hit-job in New York City inadvertently sparked a boom in celebrity tabloid journalism in small-town Florida…
[Read The Tabloid Triangle]

PART II/ Angels And Un-American Activity

How Roy Cohn, the shadiest shitbag to ever earn a law degree, bankrolled the Enquirer on the sly while becoming a mentor to Donald Trump…
[Read Angels And Un-American Activity]

PART III/ Suburban Decay

How the rather dry world of supermarket distribution channels revolutionised tabloid gossip in America – and how David Pecker used it all to make Playboy Playmate disappear…
[Read Suburban Decay]

PART IV/ Electile Dysfunction

How a critically ridiculed scandal rag managed to be one of the only publications to correctly call the 2016 election, where all of its serious-minded counterparts completely missed the ball…
[Read Electile Dysfunction]

PART V/ No Stone Left Unturned

How Roger Stone, the self-styled “Ratfucker of American politics”, has been using the National Enquirer to do his dirty work for at least the last 25 years…
[Read No Stone Left Unturned]

With the closure of the Pool last week, alongside massive lay-offs and restructuring at BuzzFeed and Vice, people are once again asking how we’re ever going to make digital media sustainable.

As we’ve been saying for a while now, we think our best hope is to support a brand new payment system – one where you can add money to a centralised online wallet that can then be used across multiple sites to pay for things on a pay-as-you-read basis. The system we’ve chosen (Agate) is still in its early stages, but it means we can charge you a measly 25p per article (and no more than 50p per week) to cover the costs of creating and publishing these expansive long-form stories.

The temptation – when sitting on a huge, timely story like our National Enquirer one – is to drop the payments. Turn it free for 48 hours. Get as many people to the site as possible. Hammer the PR angle.

But this took a long time to research. It took a lot of effort to write. And if we can’t get you to pay pocket change to read a fascinating, far-reaching, multipart series on one of the most crucial and curious stories of the decade – one that got us profiled by the motherfucking Columbia Journalism Review – then we’re probably not going to be able to get you to pay for anything.

Which is fine. The newsletter will stay free and you can continue to get good gossip every Thursday with a clear conscience. But if you like what we do and you want us to keep going, we hope you’ll consider signing up for an Agate wallet and reading the whole series this week.

Thank you.

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