The bizarre, years-long drama behind the story of Jeff Bezos’ secret extramarital affair is about to get even weirder. A seedy figure affiliated with the National questioner alleges in court that one of Hollywood’s most powerful players provided the grocery store tabloid with the sordid details of the affair.
After Bezos announced in 2018 that he would be divorcing Mackenzie Bezos, his wife of 25, the National questioner revealed that the richest man in the world was having an affair with Lauren Sanchez, a television host and pilot from Southern California. The sleazy supermarket tabloid’s series about the affair – which featured snappy text messages and evocative photos between Bezos and Sanchez – sparked off a bizarre and expansive public hunt for the source or sources of the information in Sanchez’s now estranged brother Michael Sanchez. , top executives at Questioner parent company American Media Inc., and even the Saudi government.
Now, Nikolaos Tzima Hatziefstathiou, a journalist with a strange and disturbing criminal history who tells the story with the National questioner and AMI (since renamed “A360 Media”), claim that a major source of the information was Lauren Sanchez’s then husband, William Morris Endeavor director Patrick Whitesell.
Hatziefstathiou’s allegations are part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Michael Sanchez against AMI this year, alleging that the tabloid media company lied when it denounced him as the sole source of information about the Bezos affair.
In an affidavit filed by Michael Sanchez’s legal team, Hatziefstathiou claimed that then AMI senior vice president Dylan Howard assigned him to investigate Bezos’s affair after being told of the relationship by Whitesell, the executive chairman. from Endeavor, one of the most prominent talent agencies in the world.
Hatziefstathiou claimed the affair was a useful excuse for the Endeavor director to break up his marriage, but AMI intended to protect him as a source.
Mr. Whitesell discovered the affair and, by serving as AMI’s secret, undisclosed source, the affair literally turned into a ‘get out of divorce free card’, allowing him to leave his wife … through a pre-planned divorce. in which he appeared flawless and scandal-free just months prior to the planned IPO of WME, ”Hatziefstathiou wrote in the filing.
Representatives for Howard and AMI / A360 did not immediately return requests for comment.
“This is categorically untrue, and unfortunately not the first time we’ve seen Michael Sanchez’s desperate attempt to perpetuate this strange and exhausting circus,” Patrick Whitesell spokesman told The Daily Beast. “The fact that Patrick is involved in this bizarre series of lawsuits and allegations is a direct result of the nature of those involved and is completely unrelated to reality. Any suggestion to the contrary is malicious and defamatory. “
In Hatziefstathiou’s 2020 letter of resignation from AMI, which is included in this week’s filing, he wrote that the company had included “blatant lies” in the court documents related to the Bezos affair, saying that AMI misled the courts about the source of information.
But the former AMI journalist himself has a questionable history of legal troubles that could color the court’s view of his reliability and truthfulness. In 2019, he was charged with 20 criminal counts for a bizarre scam posing as journalists for the New York Times and Good Morning America and created a fake racist email claiming to be from a Delaware County probation and parole officer.
Like the Philly Voice noted, he previously pleaded guilty to calling the police to report a malfunction at his neighbor’s house after sending dozens of prostitutes there, and was told by a judge to stop watching police films after trying to set up a drug dealer for the police.
Much of Hatziefstathiou’s testimony this week is a somewhat sparse defense of his own personal conduct and details of his coverage of the Bezos affair. Although Hatziefstathiou claims that Whitesell was involved, the filing did not include any exhibits beyond his own testimony, clearly linking the WME director to AMI.
Still, Hatziefstathiou said in the filing that he additionally has “ten terabytes” of data consisting of one million documents about AMI and his coverage of the Bezos affair to back up his claims.
The question of who leaked information about the Bezos affair to AMI and the Questioner has spawned a years-long hunt involving some of the darkest players in the worlds of gossip journalism, entertainment and corporate espionage. In 2019, The Daily Beast first reported that Michael Sanchez was AMI’s source for the steamy text messages between his sister and Bezos, a revelation that the Questioner later confirmed.
In a court filing last July – AMI’s motion to dismiss Michael Sanchez’s lawsuit and punish him for alleged abuse of the judicial system – the The questioner the parent company contained a cache of emails, text messages, and affidavits from AMI employees who tended to blame Sanchez as the source of the lusty stories. The court documents painted a picture of Sanchez as an unfaithful brother eager to sell his married sister and her secret billionaire lover.
AMI eventually agreed to pay Sanchez $ 200,000, according to the July 2020 court indictment, for “information, photos and text messages documenting an affair between Bezos and L. Sanchez.” It was, as it turned out, a lost proposition. Last month, after a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge dismissed Michael Sanchez’s separate defamation case against Bezos and his security adviser Gavin de Becker, Sanchez was ordered to pay the billionaire $ 218,385 for Bezos’ legal fees.
AMI’s lawsuit, meanwhile, contained chronological inconsistencies, raising questions about the The questioner original source, which are detailed in Hatziefstathiou’s affidavit claiming that it was Hollywood power broker Whitesell who first informed the tabloid about Bezos and Sanchez’s relationship.
The text messages, delivered by Michael Sanchez, weren’t the only glaring evidence of the affair in the US The questioner possession. And Sanchez claimed he was not the only AMI source, a theory that Bezos’ camp seemed to share.
In a lengthy 2019 column for The Daily Beast, Gavin de Becker, Bezos’ top security adviser, wrote that his investigation concluded with “great confidence” that the “Saudis had access to Bezos’s phone and received private information. As of today, it is unclear to what extent AMI was aware of the details. Experts from the United Nations later gave credence to those claims.
While suggesting that the Saudis had access to Bezos’s phone, De Becker publicly questioned why AMI itself almost seemed to intend Michael Sanchez as the The questioner source. “What was unusual, very unusual, was how hard AMI people worked to make the identity of their source public,” he wrote. “First through strong hints they gave me, and later through direct statements, AMI practically pinned a kick me ‘mark on Michael Sanchez.”
Bezos wrote in a 2019 Medium post that AMI tried to ‘blackmail’ him, saying the media company threatened to publish a selfie under the belt, otherwise known as a ‘d * ck pick’. [sic]Unless the Washington Post stopped investigating the leak.
“Any personal embarrassment that AMI might cause me takes a backseat, because there’s a much more important issue here,” Bezos wrote. “If I can’t handle this kind of extortion in my position, how many people can?”