Another Hollywood awards ceremony passed with the usual red carpet fashion show, earnest acceptance speeches and mingling of the rich and famous. So few found it remarkable when billionaire Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, was photographed at an after-party with TV presenter and helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez.

But just a few days after the Golden Globes, it would become clear this picture was a crucial clue to the unravelling of Bezos’s 25-year marriage – and a tangled web of intrigue now spanning the worlds of Washington politics, New York tabloids and Los Angeles showbusiness.

Add into the mix this week some lurid photographs, allegations of blackmail and a put-it-all-out-there blogpost by Bezos, and the man who gave the world “The Everything Store” had delivered “The Everything Scandal” – possibly all the way to the doorstep of the American president and his allies in Saudi Arabia.

In an era when every controversy seems to have a connection to Donald Trump, there was of course a connection to him. Speculation was rife that the world’s most powerful man had weaponized a supermarket tabloid to go after the world’s richest. Trump, 72, and 55-year-old Bezos do, after all, have a keen rivalry, at least in the president’s mind.

Bezos, who founded Amazon as an online bookseller in 1994 and bought the Washington Post in 2013, is now worth $136bn, a fortune that dwarfs Trump’s. For three years Trump has attacked him on Twitter, spuriously accusing Amazon of dodging taxes at the expense of the post office and the Post of trafficking in “fake news”. But Bezos has kept his cool and refused to take the bait, probably riling the president even more.

Bezos’s personal life came under unwelcome scrutiny a month ago in almost Trumpian style, however. On 9 January, three days after the Golden Globes, he used Twitter to announce his divorce from novelist MacKenzie Bezos. The following day, the National Enquirer tabloid revealed Bezos’s extramarital affair with Sanchez, 49, a former host of So You Think You Can Dance? now in the process of divorcing her husband.

In coverage sprawling across 11 pages, the Enquirer said its reporters followed Bezos and Sanchez “across five states and 40,000 miles” and “tailed them in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways, intimate dinner dates and ‘quality time’ in hidden love nests”. The tabloid reported that Bezos sent “sleazy text messages and gushing love notes” to Sanchez.

It is safe to assume that no previous US president would have passed comment. But Trump could not conceal his sense of schadenfreude. “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post,” he gloated on Twitter. “Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!”

That was not the end, however.

With almost unlimited resources at his disposal, Bezos hired a crack team of private investigators to find out how the Enquirer had got its hands on his text messages and photos. David Pecker, owner of the Enquirer and longtime friend of Trump, was “apoplectic” when he learned the tables had been turned, according to Bezos’s blogpost, and threatened to publish more material unless Bezos called his investigators off.

Enquirer editor Dylan Howard allegedly sent an email warning of nine intimate images in excruciating detail. They included a “below the belt selfie — otherwise colloquially known as a dick pick”.

By Bezos’s account, Pecker’s team made an offer: the Enquirer would agree to not publish the photos if Bezos and his investigators released a public statement “affirming that they have no knowledge or basis” to suggest the tabloid’s coverage was “politically motivated or influenced by political forces”.

Bezos announced he was divorcing his wife McKenzie after 25 years of marriage. Photograph: Jerod Harris/Getty Images

Bezos refused and punched the bully instead. “Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption,” he writes. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”

His blogpost, published on the neutral Medium website under the title “No thank you, Mr Pecker”, flipped the script and earned widespread approbation. Journalist Carl Bernstein, who reported on the Watergate saga, told CNN that Bezos “in this instance has acted heroically, in terms of establishing that neither he nor the Post will be intimidated”. Nicholas Thompson, editor of Wired, tweeted: “Amazing that the National Enquirer has been so repulsive that the whole internet is rooting for a billionaire who got busted for an affair.”

Others were awed by the epic, multi-layered nature of the scandal and how it captures the spirit of the times. Robinson Meyer wrote in the Atlantic magazine: “In a little more than 2,000 words, Bezos seemed to rip every headline out of the newspaper and bind them in an eternal neon braid: the mighty power of billionaires, the immiseration of American journalism, the thin smudge of porniness that smartphones have layered onto reality — all of that, and President Donald Trump (who is a close friend of David Pecker, AMI’s chief executive), and the corruption and journalist-murdering malice of the Saudi government, which Bezos alleges is wrapped up in his story ‘for reasons still to be better understood.’”

The trail of crumbs to Trump and Saudi Arabia is circumstantial and tantalising. The Enquirer has long engaged in “catch-and-kill” agreements on behalf of the New York property tycoon, paying for negative stories to ensure they never see the light of day.

These included Trump’s alleged affairs with adult film actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen MacDougal. Parent company American Media Inc (AMI), admitted criminal conduct last year in a plea deal with federal prosecutors, receiving immunity in exchange for giving evidence against Trump’s legal fixer Michael Cohen. Prosecutors are now reportedly looking at whether the Enquirer’s feud with Bezos violated the cooperation and non-prosecution agreement.

Meanwhile, Bezos suggested in his blogpost that the Washington Post’s reporting on the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, may have made him a target of Pecker. AMI produced a glossy pro-Saudi tabloid, he points out.

He also noted that Pecker and AMI have been “investigated for various actions they’ve taken on behalf of the Saudi government” and adds cryptically that “for reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve”. Trump has also been criticized for his cosy relationship with the Saudi government and failure to demand answers about Khashoggi’s death.

On Friday AMI said its board of directors ordered a prompt and thorough investigation and will take “whatever appropriate action is necessary.” Adel al-Jubeir , the Saudi foreign minister, told CBS’s Face the Nation programme: “This sounds to me like a soap opera. I’ve been watching it on television and reading about it in the paper. This is something between the two parties. We have nothing to do with it.”

But as of Friday night, there had been an uncharacteristic response from the White House: silence.