An already-struggling American Media Inc. has been battered with a new barrage of troubles.
The publisher of Us Weekly, the National Enquirer, In Touch, OK! and Radar Online, among others, has already been forced to gut Radar and OK!’s digital staff in recent weeks. Now it’s slashed its staff’s pay, and has been hit with a new lawsuit.
On Saturday its chairman, David Pecker, sent an e-mail to staff — seen by Page Six — announcing that their salaries would be cut by 23% indefinitely, beginning April 1. He said the coronavirus pandemic had caused a “sudden loss of millions of dollars in the short term,” blaming the crash on tanked newsstand sales and the sharp decline in travel (its titles rely heavily on people picking them up to read on flights and train rides), plus a decline in ad sales because of the global economic impact of the virus.
“All American Media staff must band together at this time in an effort to save jobs and stabilize the company,” Pecker wrote. At the beginning of March, AMI cut so many staff from Radar and OK!’s digital operations that the outlets struggled to publish new stories.
Meanwhile, Variety reports that on Friday, Michael Sanchez — brother of Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez — filed a lawsuit against AMI, claiming the publisher had defamed him by claiming in a statement that he was the “single source” of the Enquirer’s expose about Bezos’ relationship with Sanchez, which included sexts between his sister and the Amazon chief. In a statement to Variety, AMI denied defaming Michael and called the suit “frivolous.”
A rep for AMI didn’t get back to us.