Adam Aron, the outspoken chairman and chief executive officer of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., said he was the victim of a failed extortion plot last year related to “false allegations” about his personal life.
(Bloomberg) — Adam Aron, the outspoken chairman and chief executive officer of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., said he was the victim of a failed extortion plot last year related to “false allegations” about his personal life.
Aron said he reported the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Department of Justice, according to a post on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. The AMC board reviewed the events with outside counsel, according to Aron, and the matter is now “closed.”
The post followed a report from Semafor, highlighting some of the plot as detailed in court records.
Throughout his tenure leading the world’s largest movie theater chain, Aron has made his freewheeling persona on social media a big part of his leadership style and he routinely banters with fans and attacks his critics.
Last year in an interview with Bloomberg News, he said he handles all of his interactions on X by himself without the buffer of a traditional public relations team.
His cavalier attitude on social media has at times raised eyebrows in the media. In June 2021, he was doing a remote interview with a YouTube market influencer when he accidentally bumped his webcam, which swiveled downward to reveal that he wasn’t wearing pants. That same year, during an investor roundtable, he was briefly caught on Zoom untrousered, according to a participant.
During a difficult time for movie theater chains, Aron has used his insouciant style on X, where he has more than 300,000 followers, to attract a passionate fan base of retail investors. Calling themselves Apes, they tend to respond favorably to Aron’s unusually unguarded approach to corporate communications.
A spokesperson for AMC did not respond to a request for comment.
“This was entirely a personal matter,” Aron wrote on X.
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