[citation needed] Eight years later, CBS sold its magazine division in a leveraged buyout to its manager, Peter Diamandis; Pecker stayed on in his position.
After Diamandis's departure three years later, Pecker was appointed CEO at Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.[3] In 1999, Pecker left Hachette when he raised capital from Thomas H. Lee Partners and Evercore Partners to buy American Media, Inc. (AMI), publisher of the Star, the Globe, the National Enquirer, and the Weekly World News.
[13][14][15] Pecker is on the board of directors of iPayment Holdings, Inc., Sunbeam Products, Inc. and Next Generation Network, Inc.[1] In August 2018, after his interactions with President Donald Trump were heavily reported, Pecker resigned as a director of Postmedia Network Canada Corp., a Canadian media company, a position he had held since October 2016.
[16] In 2016, Pecker revealed to the Toronto Star that American Media Inc. now relied on support from Chatham Asset Management and its owner Anthony Melchiorre due to financial troubles.
[17][18] By the time Pecker agreed to sell the National Enquirer on April 10, 2019, Chatham Asset Management owned 80 percent of American Media Inc's stock.
[5] In March 2018, Karen McDougal filed a lawsuit against American Media in Los Angeles Superior Court, aiming to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement preventing her from speaking about an alleged affair with Trump.
[31] AMI reporters were given the names of the woman and the alleged child, while Sajudin passed a lie detector test when testifying that he had heard the story from others.
[36] On February 27, 2019, Cohen testified under oath to the House Oversight Committee that he and Pecker conspired to "catch-and-kill" stories which had the potential to damage Trump.
[37] On April 22, 2024, Pecker was the first witness to testify in Trump's New York criminal trial after being subpoenaed by prosecution, with the case being centered around the Stormy Daniels allegations.
[38][40][39] However, he would acknowledge that he had a private email address set up for things he didn't want his assistant to see and also revealed some of the last four digits of the multiple phone numbers he had during the time period of the allegations from 2015 to about 2017.
[44] On April 23, 2024, Pecker testified in court that he and others at the National Enquirer had created false stories about Trump's political challengers in order to further Trump's first Presidential campaign, including one about Texas Senator Ted Cruz's father supposedly having ties to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
[48] Pecker also testified that he was aware at the time that it was illegal to coordinate with a political campaign to make this kind of payment to influence an election.
[50] In January 2019, Pecker's National Enquirer published what it called "sleazy text messages and gushing love notes" between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, a sexual partner at the time, now his fiancée.
[54] Any violation of law by AMI would constitute a breach of the immunity agreement the company reached with prosecutors in 2018 after the paper agreed to "catch and kill" a story on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump.
[4] In April 2024, Pecker acknowledged that checkbook journalism was a part of his editorial philosophy, and that he also believed that “The only thing that is important is the cover of a magazine.”[38][40]