Amazon Founder Jeff Sues His Girlfriend’s Brother For $1.7 Million

Amazon founder, ranked the world’s second richest person with a net worth of $193 billion, sued his girlfriend’s brother for $1.7 million, to cover the legal fee he spent on successfully defending a defamation lawsuit.

Bezos’ girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez’s brother, Michael Sanchez, sued Bezos and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, claiming they defamed him by telling journalists that Michael had been the source of nude photos of Bezos that were leaked to the National Enquirer.

The case was dismissed because Michael Sanchez’s only evidence was that he had heard that from journalists.

Michael Sanchez betrayed his sister and Bezos by selling their private communications to the tabloid for $200,000 and then doubled down by filing a lawsuit, intended to harass Bezos into a settlement “by threatening discovery and public disclosure of private matters,” Bezos said, in the request filed last Friday in the Los Angeles Superior Court.

“Mr. Bezos’s fee request is obscene, even grotesque, on many levels,” Tom Warren, an attorney for Michael Sanchez, said in an email.

In November, a California state judge threw out Sanchez’s lawsuit under a state law that allows for expedited dismissal of baseless lawsuits over protected speech.

Under the anti-Slapp statute, the prevailing defendant is entitled to have legal costs reimbursed by the plaintiff.

In 2019, Bezos went public with what he termed was an extortion attempt by the National Enquirer.

He said the National Enquirer had threatened to publish more details of his relationship with Lauren Sanchez as well as revealing photos if he didn’t stop investigating what had prompted a January 2019 expose about their affair while Bezos was still married to MacKenzie Scott. Bezos and Scott got divorced in 2019.