On 27 March, the brother of Jeff Bezos' new girlfriend, Michael Sanchez, filed a lawsuit against American Media Inc (AMI) on defamation charges amid the case surrounding Bezos' extramarital affair disclosed by the AMI's National Enquirer earlier in 2019.
AMI insisted that the source of scoop about Amazon CEO's affair is Sanchez. Sanchez accused the company of trying to make him a "scapegoat", claiming that he only provided AMI with private texts but did not provide the photographs that were obtained by AMI.
"The untold story – if you will – has not been told as to how we uncovered the story. I’m saving it for my tombstone", said Dylan Howard, Chief Content Officer at American Media, according to the lawsuit.
Sanchez claimed in his lawsuit that the explicit materials on the affair "had been illegally obtained using high-tech spyware that secretly hacked into the billionaire’s iPhone and extracted his most private and confidential information".
Sanchez confessed that he provided some information on the affair as a means to "minimize the fallout for his sister by making a deal to cooperate strategically" with AMI in return for "control over the narrative".
Bezos insisted that AMI blackmailed him with photos that were never disclosed to the public. The Amazon CEO's claim of being blackmailed remains under FBI investigation. Last year, his top security consultant, Gavin De Becker, said that he did not believe Sanchez had played the key role in the National Enquirer scoop.
"Reality is complicated, and can’t always be boiled down to a simple narrative like “the brother did it,” even when that brother is a person who certainly supplied some information to a supermarket tabloid", De Becker wrote in an article in Daily Beast.
Bezos' extramarital affair with Lauren Sanchez resulted in his divorce from his wife, MacKenzie Bezos.
In January,The Guardian reported that Bezos' telephone was hacked after he received a WhatsApp message from the personal account of Saudi Arabia crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman, which Saudi Arabia has denied.