When Adam Aron's phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number in March 2022, he recognized the name of the sender: Mia.
"Is my memory right that you were into ballet?" Aron replied.
The woman on the other end played along: "Yes!" she replied.
And so began the text exchange that would quickly turn from flirty to explicit — and within weeks morph into extortion of Aron, who is AMC's CEO.
The sender was not actually named Mia. It was Sakoya Blackwood, the mastermind of an elaborate blackmail scheme that would land her in jail. Five months after sending her first text, she was indicted by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who charged her with extortion and cyberstalking. She pleaded guilty this summer, and earlier this month, Aron confirmed a Semafor report that he was the unnamed CEO in the case.
It's not Aron's first time in the spotlight. He became something of a household name when, in 2021, he embraced the meme-stock craze, taking on a larger-than-life persona that helped AMC's stock surge. He appeared to take advantage of the craze, cashing out shares worth at least $40 million over the course of a few months. The move earned him the title of "villain of the year" by the Hollywood pundit Matthew Belloni and drew ire from analysts. (Aron also drew headlines that year for appearing to wear no pants during a Zoom call).
Soon, Aron, who did not respond to Insider's request for comment, would fall victim to another sort of villain. Charging documents describe in detail Blackwood's "sophisticated and devious" catfishing scheme against him.
Here's how it went down.
It all started with that March text. It's unknown how Blackwood got Aron's phone number, but at the time she must have assumed he was wealthy. She'd read about him online and his well-documented selling spree of AMC stock, charging documents said.
She was discreet and sent the text from a voice over internet protocol, or VoIP, so it couldn't be traced. A lawyer for Blackwood did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
She was also smart, according to a sentencing memo written by her lawyers. She had been a straight-A student at Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, graduating at the top of the class of 2006 and scoring well on her SATs, the memo said. But because of her immigration status — she arrived in the US illegally from Jamaica as a child — she had no options when it came to financing college.
So she worked a number of odd jobs — at a day care and as a nanny — all off the books, her lawyers said. But during the pandemic, she tried two new pursuits: day-trading and posing as a minor to try to lure men into seemingly illegal sexual conversations. Blackwood's lawyers said the latter pursuit was a result of unspecified mental and physical abuse against her by someone close to her.
This "resentment toward her abusers" may have led her to text Aron — a wealthy, powerful man in the public eye, her lawyers said. (Though the indictment said "there is not a shred of evidence" of Aron having a history of sexual abuse or harassment.)
The message could have easily gone unanswered — had it not been for Blackwood's choice of name: Mia.
Aron recognized the name, linking her to a ballet dancer who had done "unmentionable things" — in his words, over text — to him just a few years earlier.
"Send me a naughty picture," Blackwood texted, a couple weeks into their flirty exchange.
He complied, sending some photos of himself solo and with another woman. When he asked for photos in return, Blackwood sent him images of an unnamed Russian model that she pulled from Instagram. Aron seemed to either not notice or not care that the woman in the pictures was not his ballerina paramour.
Blackwood is no stranger to fake identities, and Mia is one of many she's assumed over the years. Law enforcement found at least five forms of fake identification in her home, including two Arizona driver's licenses, one New York City ID card, one California driver's license, and the badge of a Mount Sinai doctor. The indictment refers to her as Sakoya Blackwood, Koya Blackwood Fews, and, inexplicably, Lila Cohen.
In her plot against Aron, she proved herself a master of digital disguise.
On April 15, after nearly a month of flirtatious texts with Aron, Blackwood sent Aron a text from another phone number posing as "Brian," the "ex-boyfriend" of "Mia."
"Brian" had seen some "incendiary shit" on Mia's phone and was "probably selling the information," Blackwood texted under her new alias, floating the possibility of reaching out to the National Enquirer — a tabloid infamous for shelling out for juicy stories.
"Ceo scandal is apparently lucrative," Blackwood texted, posing as Brian. She threatened to sell the pictures and spread a false rumor that Aron had been intimate with a minor.
By then, Aron realized he'd been caught up in some kind of trouble, and that he'd never actually met Mia. He consulted an attorney. The the next day, Blackwood, posing as Brian, threatened to text AMC board members the illicit photos.
"Offers are coming in like crazy ppl love a scandal," Blackwood wrote under the guise of Brian.
Meanwhile, on a separate line, Blackwood posed as Mia and discouraged Aron from hiring legal help.
"He could do more damage than you could while getting paid for doing it," she said, referring to Brian.
A few days later, Blackwood introduced a third fake identity: the representative of a media agency, who claimed they'd gotten a tip on Aron. It "promised to be damning."
That's when Blackwood began to work the phone as all three of her characters and tried to lock down a payout.
As the "media contact," she informed Aron that an outlet would be buying the photos for $250,000. As Mia, she suggested Aron inform his family, because Brian was "going for the money."
"smart move was u should've been trying to make a deal," she texted, posing as Brian — and added that a bidding war had sent the price of the Aron scoop to $315,000.
It was just nine days after Blackwood had first posed as Brian, and Aron's world was in a tailspin. He'd reached out to the FBI, and the story was only getting more bizarre.
Under the alias of Mia, Blackwood said she sold her eggs, raising $300,000 to pay off Brian and save Aron. But Brian didn't want to take her money: Aron had to pay, himself, or Brian would go to the media, according to Blackwood's elaborate plot.
That same day, she took her scheme to Twitter.
"I have it on extremely good authority there's a scandal brewing around @CEOAdam he's too busy threatening ppl with his attorney to care abt shareholders. Who do u think will replace him?" she tweeted from the handle TwoTruth1.
I have it on extremely good authority there's a scandal brewing around @CEOAdam he's too busy threatening ppl with his attorney to care abt shareholders. Who do u think will replace him?
— Two Truth (@TwoTruth1) April 29, 2022But the tweets got no traction — and Aron didn't bite. Blackwood didn't stand down. She invented persona No. 4 (five if you count the Twitter account) in June. This time, it was a Vanity Fair reporter.
"I was shown some images and I was wondering if you're available to speak," the fake reporter texted Aron.
By July, when Aron still hadn't paid up, Blackwood sent a text as Brian that said: "A porn site just reached out to me looking for the pics."
In the background, law enforcement was tracking down Blackwood. She was arrested at her home in the Bronx on August 21, 2022, and never shared Aron's photos.
It was the end of the five-month saga Aron had been living out on his cellphone.
The details as laid out in the court documents read like something out of a soap opera: A wealthy man is lured by a fake former fling and falls victim to a blackmail scheme. There's money, sex, deception, and a cast of characters.
But while Aron was "suffering from the constant fear that his life would be ruined," according to the filings, he was also continuing his normal Twitter antics — sharing photos of his face imposed on the body of an ape (he's known to his fans, called the apes, as "silverback") and video of an airplane banner ad reading "AMC to the moon."
The case was officially closed in July, when Blackwood was sentenced to time served and three years of supervised release. But the mystery of the CEO at the center of the scandal wasn't revealed until earlier this month, when Aron came clean.
"Rather than give in to blackmail, I personally engaged counsel and other professional advisors and reported the matter to law enforcement," Aron tweeted. "I did so knowing I risked personal embarrassment. But with my access to resources, if I did not stand up against blackmail, who could?"
Aron seemed to be taking a page from Jeff Bezos' book. In 2019, when Bezos was still CEO of Amazon, he outed himself as sending racy texts to his now fiancée Lauren Sanchez — also known as "alive girl" — before the National Enquirer could.
"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," Bezos wrote at the time. "I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out."
Aron hasn't shared how going public with the attempted extortion has affected his personal life — he is, after all, married — but it hasn't been great for AMC. The theater chain's stock had been climbing after the successful release of Taylor Swift's "Eras Tour" film; though the stock dropped 14% when investors found out Aron was tied up in this mess. It's down 42% year over year.
In a statement to Semafor, AMC's board said that it "determined it was a personal matter, and considers the issue resolved."
Meanwhile, Aron seems unfazed — at least publicly. He's been tweeting out images of trophies and lauding the success of the Swift movie in drawing box-office sales.
The real test may be whether or not the apes decide to enact revenge.
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