A new report from the Daily Beast that cites multiple sources identifies the brother of Jeff Bezos' mistress, Lauren Sanchez, as the source of the couple's racy texts that were leaked to the National Enquirer.
The sources identify Michael Sanchez as the person responsible for supplying the Amazon CEO's texts to the Enquirer, who broke the story last month about the extramarital affair between Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. The story included intimate texts from Bezos that he sent to his lover. "I want to smell you, I want to breathe you in. I want to hold you tight.”
In an extraordinary post published on Medium Thursday night, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accused American Media Inc. of trying to blackmail him with several intimate photos they obtained during the course of their investigation into his affair. Bezos said AMI wanted him to drop an investigation into whether the National Enquirer had a political motivation in printing their story about him.
During an appearance on "This Week," the attorney for the CEO of American Media Inc., David Pecker, said emails sent to Bezos by AMI leadership "absolutely is not extortion and not blackmail."
“The story was given to the National Enquirer by a reliable source that had given information to the National Enquirer for seven years prior to this story. It was a source that was well known to both Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez,” attorney Elkan Abramowitz told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
When Abramowitz was asked by Stephanopoulos whether Sanchez's brother Michael was the leak, the attorney refused to identify the source, citing confidentiality, but said that it was, "somebody close to both Bezos and Miss Sanchez."
In a written statement to the Washington Post last week, Michael Sanchez denied being the source of the texts to the Enquirer, accusing Bezos' security consultant Gavin de Becker of "lies, half-truths, sloppy tabloid leaks, [and] crazy conspiracy theories.”
Photo: Getty Images