The strange drama of many years hidden behind the story of Jeff Bezos ’secret extramarital affair is about to get even stranger. An obscure figure affiliated with the National researcher he claims in court that one of Hollywood’s most powerful players provided the supermarket tabloid with sordid details of the affair.
After Bezos announced in 2018 that he was separating from Mackenzie Bezos, his 25-year-old wife, the National researcher revealed that the richest man in the world had an affair with Lauren Sanchez, a Southern California television presenter and pilot. The poor publication of the supermarket series on the subject, which included text messages and suggestive photos between Bezos and Sanchez, launched a strange and extensive public hunt for the source or sources of information, chaining himself to Brother Michael Sanchez , today away from Sanchez. executives of Surveyor the parent company American Media Inc., and even the Saudi government.
Now, Nikolaos Tzima Hatziefstathiou, a journalist with a strange and disturbing criminal history who reported the story with National researcher and AMI (since it was renamed “A360 Media”), states that one of the main sources of information was Lauren Sanchez’s then-husband, William Morris Endeavor executive Patrick Whitesell.
Hatziefstathiou’s allegations are part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Michael Sanchez this year against AMI, alleging that the regular media company lied when he declared him the sole source of information on the matter. of Bezos.
In an affidavit filed by Michael Sanchez’s legal team, Hatziefstathiou claimed that AMI senior vice president Dylan Howard has assigned him to examine the Bezos affair after Whitesell, the executive president of Endeavor , informed him about the relationship. talent agencies in the world.
Hatziefstathiou claimed the matter was a convenient excuse for the Endeavor executive to break up his marriage, but AMI intended to protect him as a source.
“Mr. Whitesell discovered Affair and, by serving as AMI’s secret and undisclosed source, literally turned Affair into a “divorce-free card,” which allowed him to leave his wife … through a pre-planned divorce in which it seemed irreproachable and scandalous. “Free, just a few months before the initial public offering planned by WME,” Hatziefstathiou wrote in the archive.
Howard and AMI / A360 representatives did not immediately return requests for comment.
“This is categorically false, and unfortunately it is not the first time we have seen this desperate attempt by Michael Sanchez to perpetuate this strange and tiring circus,” Patrick Whitesell’s spokesman told The Daily Beast. “The fact that Patrick has been involved in this strange series of lawsuits and incriminations is a direct result of the nature of those involved and is completely disconnected from reality. Any suggestion to the contrary is malicious and defamatory. “
In Hatziefstathiou’s letter of resignation from Hatziefstathiou in 2020, which is included in this week’s presentation, he wrote that the company included “blatant lies” in its legal proceedings related to the Bezos case, saying that AMI deceives the courts on the source of information.
But the former AMI journalist has a dubious track record of legal issues that could color the court’s view on its reliability and veracity. In 2019 he was charged with 20 criminal offenses for a strange scam in which he pretended to be a journalist from the New York News and Good Morning America and created a fake racist email claiming to be from a Delaware County parole and adult parole officer.
Like the Philly Voice He noted that he had previously pleaded guilty to calling law enforcement to report a disturbance to his neighbor’s home after sending dozens of prostitutes, and a judge told him to stop watching movies of police after trying to establish a drug dealer for the police.
Much of Hatziefstathiou’s testimony this week is some divergence from his defense of his own personal conduct and the details of his reports on the Bezos affair. Furthermore, while Hatziefstathiou claims that Whitesell was involved, the presentation did not include any exposition beyond his own testimony that clearly related the WME executive to AMI.
Still, Hatziefstathiou said in the presentation that it also has “ten terabytes” of data consisting of a million documents on AMI and its coverage of the Bezos case to support its claims.
The question of who leaked information about Bezos ’affair to AMI et al Surveyor has sparked an extensive year-long hunt involving some of the world’s most shadowy players in tabloid journalism, entertainment and corporate espionage. In 2019, The Daily Beast first reported that Michael Sanchez was the source of AMI for steamy text messages between his sister and Bezos, a revelation Surveyor confirmed later.
In a court he filed last July – AMI’s motion to dismiss Michael Sanchez’s lawsuit and sanction him for allegedly abusing the judicial system. Surveyor the parent company included a cache of emails, text messages, and affidavits from AMI employees that tend to point to Sanchez as the source of the wild stories. Court documents painted a picture of Sanchez as an unfaithful brother who wanted to sell his married sister and her secret multimillion-dollar lover.
AMI finally agreed to pay Sanchez $ 200,000, according to the July 2020 court application, for “information, photographs and text messages documenting an affair between Bezos and L. Sanchez.” It was, as it turned out, a losing proposition. Last month, after a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge dismissed Michael Sanchez’s defamation suit against Bezos and his security adviser Gavin de Becker, Sanchez was ordered to pay the billionaire $ 218,385 for the legal costs of Bezos.
Meanwhile, the AMI judicial record contained chronological inconsistencies, which raised questions about the Surveyor initial source, which is described in detail in Hatziefstathiou’s affidavit alleging that it was Hollywood runner Whitesell who first alerted the tabloid about the Bezos-Sanchez relationship.
The text messages, provided by Michael Sanchez, were not the only evidence of the matter Surveyor possession. And Sanchez claimed he was not the only source of AMI, a theory the Bezos camp seemed to share.
In a lengthy 2019 column in The Daily Beast, Bezos ’top security consultant, Gavin de Becker, wrote that his investigation concluded with“ great confidence ”that the“ Saudis had access to Bezos ’phone and obtained information Today, it is unclear to what extent, if any, AMI knew the details. ”Later, United Nations experts confirmed these claims.
Although he suggested that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, Becker publicly wondered why the AMI itself almost seemed to be trying to get out of Michael Sanchez as Surveyor font. “What was unusual, very unusual, was how hard the AMI people worked to publicly reveal the identity of their source,” he wrote. “First through strong leads they gave me and later through direct statements, AMI practically put up a Michael Kick poster.”
Bezos wrote in a mid-2019 publication that AMI was trying to “blackmail him,” saying the media company threatened to post a “selfie below the belt,” colloquially known as a “d * ck pick.” [sic]” Unless the Washington Post stopped investigating the leak.
“Any personal embarrassment that the AMI can cause is that I have a background because here is a much more important issue,” Bezos wrote. “If in my position I can’t stand this kind of extortion, how many people can?”