Jeff Bezos bio makes bombshell claims about alleged Saudi role
Jeff Bezos pushed an unfounded theory that Saudi Arabia was behind the revelation of his affair with Lauren Sanchez — and relished how it shifted the focus away “from the more unsavory and complicated truth,” a new biography claims.
In “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global
Empire,” author Brad Stone says that there’s no “conclusive evidence” to back
up suggestions by the world’s richest man and his security consultant that
Saudi Arabia tipped off the National Enquirer.
The nearly 500-page book also reveals that the infamous,
purported selfie of Bezos’ penis wasn’t real — and was actually grabbed by
Sanchez’s brother, Michael Sanchez, from a Web site for gay escorts.
Michael Sanchez “later told FBI investigators for the
Southern District of New York that he never actually had an explicit photograph
of Bezos in his possession,” Stone writes.
In a chapter detailing how Bezos blew up his 25-year
marriage to since-remarried MacKenzie Scott, Stone notes how the billionaire
“artfully suggested” in a February 2019 essay posted on Medium.com that the
Saudis may have behind the Enquirer’s exclusive.
Stone says Bezos “took the already muddled question of how
the paper obtained his private text messages and photographs and confused it
further” by writing online that the story’s genesis was “still to be better
understood” and that “the Saudi angle seems to hit a particular nerve” with the
Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.
Stone also highlights an article that private-security
expert Gavin de Becker — a longtime Bezos pal — penned the following month for
the Daily Beast.
“Our investigators and several experts concluded with high
confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone and gained private
information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware
of the details,” de Becker wrote.
But Stone claims the Enquirer actually got nine “personal”
photos of Bezos from Michael Sanchez under terms of a contract worth around
$200,000 — the most it ever paid for a scoop.
And Michael Sanchez allegedly got the photos from his
sister, who “frequently forwarded” Bezos’ text messages to him, according to
the book.
“The sibling relationship was, to put it mildly, unusual,”
Stone writes.
Stone says the possibility that the Saudis tipped off the
Enquirer or added to what it got from Michael Sanchez was “only a fog of
overlapping events, weak ties between disparate figures and more strange
coincidences.”
“For Bezos and his advisors, though, who were still trying
to positively spin the embarrassing events surrounding his divorce, such a
cloud of uncertainty was at the very least distracting from the more unsavory
and complicated truth.”
Meanwhile, Stone writes, the infamous penis photo wasn’t
among the images that Michael Sanchez handed over to the Enquirer — although he
did display it during a Nov. 21, 2018, meeting with reporter Andrea Simpson
after claiming he had an explicit selfie that Bezos sent to Sanchez’s sister.
With then-AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard and editor
James Robertson “watching via FaceTime from New York and recording the
transaction, Sanchez didn’t show them a picture of Bezos at all but an
anonymous photograph of male genitalia that he had captured from the gay escort
Web site Rent.men,” according to the book.
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment and de Becker didn’t
return an e-mail to his eponymous, Glendale, Calif.-based security firm.
Michael Sanchez declined to comment and an email to A360
Media — which subsumed AMI in a deal last year — wasn’t returned.
A spokesperson for Howard said, “The Office of the United
States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has advised all parties
that it has completed its investigation of allegations made by Jeff Bezos in
February 2019, and has declined to prosecute the matter.”
“We are glad that the
Government decided that Mr. Bezos’s allegations of blackmail and extortion
against personnel at The National Enquirer did not merit prosecution, as we had
believed it would all along,” the spokesperson added.
Comments
Post a Comment