A lawyer has denied allegations by Jeff Bezos that the National Enquirer tabloid had tried to extort and blackmail him, insisting that embarrassing photographs were obtained from a “reliable” source.

“It absolutely is not extortion and not blackmail,” Elkan Abramowitz, who represents National Enquirer parent company American Media Inc (AMI)’s chief executive David Pecker, told ABC television’s “This Week.”

“What happened was the story was given to the National Enquirer by a reliable source that had been given information to the National Enquirer for seven years prior to the story.

“I can tell you it’s not Saudi Arabia, it’s not President Trump, it’s not Roger Stone. But I cannot tell you who the source is.” The attorney was responding to Bezos’s stunning claims published on online platform Medium on Thursday.

When asked if the Enquirer’s source was Sanchez’s brother Michael, as reported by some media outlets, Abramowitz declined to confirm.“It was a person that was known to both Bezos and Ms Sanchez,” he said.

Bezos hinted he may have been targeted by pro-Trump forces in part because of coverage by The Washington Post, which he owns, of the murder of its contributor Jamal Khashoggi, strangled and dismembered by Saudi agents in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate in October.

But Abramowitz insisted that the Enquirer’s exchanges with Bezos, which the billionaire released in his online post, were simply journalistic negotiating practices rather than extortion.