Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has accused his gal pal’s brother, Michael Sanchez, of hiding his ownership of a $2.5 million West Hollywood bungalow in an effort to avoid reimbursing legal fees.
Michael Sanchez, the brother of Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, unsuccessfully sued the business magnate and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, last year for defamation.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge then ordered Sanchez to reimburse Bezos about $250,000 in legal fees.
But the Amazon founder, who is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $197 billion, filed a new lawsuit in Washington’s King County Superior Court last week — claiming that Sanchez has not paid and is trying to avoid paying by hiding the ownership of his multimillion-dollar home with a shell company.
Tom Warren, Sanchez’s attorney, fired back that the entrepreneur is “bullying his future brother-in-law.”
Michael Sanchez has previously referred to Bezos as his sister’s fiancé, though the couple hasn’t announced an engagement.
Warren said Sanchez is now appealing the order for him to compensate Bezos for legal fees.
“Nevertheless, last week Mr. Sanchez authorized his team to coordinate with Mr. Bezos’ counsel concerning payment of the judgment,” he told The Post. “Had Mr. Bezos’ attorneys bothered to reach out to Mr. Sanchez’ counsel before filing a lawsuit against him, they would have known that to be the case.”
In January 2019, the National Enquirer published a series of intimate text messages between Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, outing their relationship.
Bezos, in turn, accused the newspaper of extorting him with images it claimed to have of nude pictures he had sent to Sanchez.
A month later, de Becker, whom Bezos enlisted to find out how the Enquirer got hold of the messages, told the Daily Beast that Michael Sanchez was “among the people we’ve been speaking with and looking at.”
Sanchez did not rule out that he may have shared some of the messages, but he denied sharing any below-the-belt selfies of Bezos.
The Enquirer’s then-parent company AMI, though, has continually insisted that Sanchez was its only source of the messages it obtained.