The insane Jeff Bezos-National Enquirer drama takes a bizarre new turn

The bizarre years-long drama behind the story of Jeff Bezos’ secret extramarital affair becomes even stranger. A shadowy figure attached to the National Enquirer claims in court that one of Hollywood’s most powerful players provided the supermarket tabloid with the bad details of the case.

After Bezos announced in 2018 that he was dating Mackenzie Bezos, his 25-year-old wife, the National Enquirer reveals that the richest man in the world had an affair with Lauren Sanchez, a television host and pilot in Southern California. The series of the cunning supermarket tabloid on the matter – which included extremely text messages and suggestive photos between Bezos and Sanchez – began a bizarre and expansive public hunt for the source or sources of the information, and roped in Sanchez ‘s now estranged brother Michael Sanchez, top executives at Inquirer parent company American Media Inc., and even the Saudi government.

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Now, Nikolaos Tzima Hatziefstathiou, a journalist with a strange and disturbing criminal history who tells the story with the National Enquirer and AMI (called ‘A360 Media’) claims that Lauren Sanchez, then husband, William Morris Endeavor CEO Patrick Whitesell, was an important source of information.

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 he considered him the only source of information on the Bezos affair.

In an affidavit filed by Michael Sanchez’s legal team, it is alleged that Hatziefstathiou, then Vice President of the AMI, Dylan Howard, instructed him to investigate the case of Bezos after Whitesell, the executive chairman of Endeavor, one of the most famous , of the relationship was told. talent agencies in the world.

Hatziefstathiou claims the matter was an easy excuse for Endeavor’s executive to break up his marriage, but AMI intended to protect him as a source.

“Mr Whitesell discovered the Affair and, by serving as the secret, unknown source of AMI, literally turned the Affair into a ‘free divorce card’ so that he could leave his wife … through a pre-planned divorce in which he “impeccable and scandal-free, just a few months before WME’s planned initial public offering,” Hatziefstathiou wrote in the submission.

Representatives of Howard and AMI / A360 did not immediately return requests for comment.

“This is absolutely untrue, and unfortunately not the first time we’re seeing 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 was involved in this bizarre series of lawsuits and accusations is a direct result of the character involved and is completely disconnected from reality. Any suggestion against it is malicious and defamatory. ”

In Hatziefstathiou’s 2020 resignation letter from AMI, which was included in this week’s submission, he writes that the company contains ‘blatant lies’ in the court reports related to the Bezos case and says AMI is misleading the courts about the source of information.

But the former AMI journalist himself has a dubious history of legal problems that could color the court’s view of his reliability and truth. In 2019, he is charged with 20 criminal charges for a bizarre scam in which he described himself as journalists of the New York Times and Good Morning America and created a fake racist email claiming it was from an adult and parole officer in Delaware County.

Like the Philly Voice noted, he had earlier pleaded guilty to calling law enforcement to report a nuisance at his neighbor’s home after sending dozens of prostitutes there, and was told by a judge to stop watching cop movies after he tried to set up a drug dealer for the police.

A large part of Hatziefstathiou’s testimony this week is a somewhat shaky defense of his own personal conduct and details of his coverage of the Bezos case. While Hatziefstathiou claims that Whitesell was involved in it, the submission also did not include any exhibits that were outside his own testimony, clearly linking the WME executive to AMI.

Hatziefstathiou nevertheless said in the documentation that he also has ‘ten terabytes’ of data consisting of a million documents about AMI and its coverage of the Bezos case to substantiate its allegations.

The question of who leaked information about the Bezos case to AMI and the United States Inquirer launched an extensive year-long hunt involving some of the most damaging players in the world of tabloid journalism, entertainment and corporate espionage. In 2019, The Daily Beast reported that Michael Sanchez was the source of AMI for the dumb text messages between his sister and Bezos, a revelation of the Inquirer later confirmed.

In a court case filed in July last year – AMI’s motion to dismiss Michael Sanchez’s lawsuit and punish him for allegedly abusing the justice system – the Inquirer’s parent company included a locker of emails, text messages and affidavits from AMI employees that tended to point to Sanchez as the source of the blissful stories. In the court documents, Sanchez is portrayed as an unfaithful brother who wants to sell his married sister and her secret billionaire lover.

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AMI has finally agreed to pay Sanchez $ 200,000, according to the July 2020 court file for “information, photos and text messages documenting a relationship between Bezos and L. Sanchez.” It was, as it turns out, a lost proposition. Last month, after the Los Angeles County Supreme Court judge dismissed Michael Sanchez’s separate lawsuit against Bezos and his security consultant Gavin de Becker, Sanchez is ordered to pay the billionaire $ 218,385 for Bezos’ legal costs. .

AMI’s court file, meanwhile, contains chronological inconsistencies that have raised questions about the Inquirer’s original source, which is set out in detail in Hatziefstathiou’s affidavit, claiming that it was the Hollywood realtor Whitesell who first warned the tabloid newspaper about the Bezos-Sanchez relationship.

The text messages provided by Michael Sanchez were not the only blissful proof of the case in the United States Inquirer’s possess. And Sanchez maintained he was not the only AMI source, a theory that resembled Bezos’ camp.

In a lengthy 2019 column for The Daily Beast, Bezos ‘top security consultant Gavin de Becker writes that his investigation was concluded with high confidence that the’ Saudis ‘had access to Bezos’ phone and obtained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what extent, if any, AMI was aware of the details. “United Nations experts later gave confidence in these allegations.

While suggesting that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, de Becker publicly questioned why AMI itself almost intended to portray Michael Sanchez as the Inquirer’s source. “What was unusual, very unusual, was how hard AMI people worked to reveal their source’s identity in public,” he wrote. “First through strong tips they gave me, and later through direct statements, AMI virtually pinned a kick me ‘board on Michael Sanchez.”

Bezos writes in a media post from 2019 that AMI is trying to “blackmail” him and says the media company is threatening to publish a selfie under the tape – otherwise popularly known as a ‘d * ck choice [sic]” Unless the Washington Post stops investigating the leak.

“Any personal embarrassment that AMI can cause me to sit behind, because here is a much more important issue,” Bezos wrote. “If I can not stand this kind of blackmail in my position, how many people can do it?”