In early 2018, Lauren Sanchez told her brother Michael that she wanted him to meet her new “boyfriend,” Jeff Bezos.
There was just one problem: She was still married to her husband, Hollywood mega-agent Patrick Whitesell, and Jeff was still with Mackenzie, his wife of 25 years.
Michael at first refused to meet the billionaire Amazon CEO until Lauren left Whitesell. As he told multiple friends at the time, ”Not my circus, not my clowns!”
But he was eventually worn down by the beloved sister who, according to a family friend, “he practically raised.” So Michael took on the task of arranging an April 20 dinner at the former Hollywood hot-spot Hearth & Hound, choosing a select group of three friends to join them. He was, he admitted, ready not to like the CEO and wanted to write the whole thing off as a “silly fling.”
But as soon as Jeff arrived — without any security detail — Michael could see the truth: his sister and the billionaire were in love.
“I knew this was real,” he recalled. “This was my sister’s future.”
Exclusively speaking to The Post, Michael revealed how his sister’s romance with the internet tycoon was born — and how he tried to shield them before their affair became worldwide news.
At dinner, the couple sat side by side and couldn’t stop touching each other until Michael half-jokingly told Jeff to “back off.”
At the end of the night, he was alarmed when they kept it up for anyone to see — so he edged between them as the group left the restaurant and Lauren and Jeff summoned an Uber to go to the billionaire’s Beverly Hills mansion.
“This can’t happen again. You yahoos have to be careful,” Michael told them. “We have to start thinking about telling Patrick and Mackenzie.”
But, he recalled, “They were so in love they didn’t have any plan. They had no idea what they were doing. They were [regularly] together at Lauren’s Santa Monica house, which is all glass, taking all these insane risks.”
Michael grew so concerned about protecting his sister from prying eyes, he convinced her to rip out the shrubs surrounding the home — a weekend getaway where Patrick rarely visited — and replace them with “15-feet high hedges so no one could see in.
“They were drunk in love and it was my job to protect them, to protect my niece and nephews ” — Lauren’s 11-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son with Whitesell, and her 18-year-old son with former NFL player Tony Gonzalez.
Michael added: “I did it and I did it well.”
But in early January of this year, the National Enquirer began calling Jeff, Lauren and even Michael, asking for comment on the affair for a story the tabloid planned to run.
Desperate to get ahead of the piece, Jeff tweeted two days later that he and Mackenzie were divorcing. Hours later, Page Six revealed his affair with Lauren.
Michael, meanwhile, has been accused of helping leak the news. He admits he cooperated with the Enquirer by agreeing to help secure a photo of Jeff and Lauren kissing — which didn’t pan out — but added: “I would never sell out my sister. Everything I did was to protect Jeff and Lauren.”
Multiple sources tell The Post that Lauren, 49, and Jeff’s romance was on “life support” after the world found out about it and, as Page Six reported, the 55-year-old CEO pulled the plug on a Super Bowl ad for his spaceflight company, Blue Origin, that had been filmed by his lady love.
But they are still together, according to a source close to the couple, and the relationship is getting “stronger by the day.”
As Michael told The Post: ”Lauren and Jeff think they are meant to be — that it’s written in the stars.”
In fact, the love birds have turned to a high-priced psychic in New Mexico to see what the stars have in store for them.
“This is no ordinary psychic,” said the source close to the couple. “It costs thousands.”
The two actually got together in late 2017, months before it has been reported they first hooked up.
The Bezoses were longtime friends of Lauren — a former “Good Day LA” and “Extra” host — and Patrick, often sharing dinner with their children in the Seattle area, where the latter couple kept a second home and the Amazon founder’s family lived in a $70 million compound.
Indeed, the two men have worked on huge business deals together for Amazon’s film and TV ventures, including the Oscar-nominated “Manchester by the Sea” film in 2016.
Jeff and Lauren bonded over a love of flying: He has an obsession with space, and she is an accomplished pilot. Michael explained that most everyone in the Sanchez family is a pilot, and their dad, Ray, once owned 10 planes as well as a flight-training and charter business in New Mexico.
In the early 1970s, when the Sanchez siblings were small children, their mom, Eleanor, nearly lost her life in a horrific plane crash. She was in the hospital for months, which brought Lauren and Michael even closer together — a bond that intensified when Eleanor and Ray later divorced.
It was during a passionate conversation about flying, one night in 2017, that the spark between Jeff and Lauren first became obvious. The families, including Lauren and Michael’s younger half-sister Elena, and others were gathered at the Bezos estate for dinner.
“Jeff and Lauren were lost in all this talk about helicopters and space,” said the family friend. “Mackenzie was getting annoyed. Elena was like, ‘Whoa — something is happening here, time to go.’ Elena scolded Lauren on the way home.”
Lauren, apparently, was the last to see what was going on.
“She said, ‘What are you talking about? It’s just Jeff — nerdy Jeff!” the family friend added. “She had never looked at him like that.”
A year before, Lauren and Patrick had decided to separate and even quietly completed mediation with celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser. But before the split was complete, Lauren decided she wanted to work on the marriage.
Then, after the dinner, the family friend said, “All of the sudden, Lauren started to think Jeff was really cool. It was the first time she had ever processed that he could even be thinking about her.”
A friend of Lauren’s added: “She has this kind of aura that when she walks into a room men go insane — she doesn’t even have to try. Initially, she had no idea [Jeff] liked her like that. Then he made some awkward moves and made his interest known.
“They didn’t ever see it as ‘an affair.’ They both felt like it was a level of love they’d never felt, [even] before they took the first step. They had been flirting for a long time and . . . they knew this was going to be something serious.”
For months, Jeff and Lauren carried on without anyone knowing.
Then, in July 2018, Dylan Howard, vice president and chief content officer at American Media Inc. (the parent company of the National Enquirer) and a longtime acquaintance of Michael’s, called him to say the tabloid was looking into his sister’s affair, Michael said. The magazine had seen text exchanges between the secret couple, he said.
Michael decided to try to defuse the situation himself — and didn’t tell Lauren or Jeff.
“If they knew that the National Enquirer knew about the affair, it would’ve instantly been the end of the relationship,” he said. “Jeff would have been scared off, and they would’ve split up. One hundred percent.”
Instead, Michael said he would help the tabloid score a picture of the pair kissing. This would be, he told The Post, in return for “softer” coverage — and to push off publication of the story long enough for the couple to tell their families the truth. (The photo never happened because, although Michael agreed to try and make it happen, he had no intention of following through, insiders say.)
“Michael . . . will defend Lauren to the death,” said the family friend. “That’s the essence of their relationship as children, and the essence of their relationship today.”
Finally, in November 2018, Lauren told Whitesell she wanted to go through with the divorce after all, sources said. Meanwhile, Jeff told Mackenzie he wanted a separation, even as the couple reportedly sought advice from Hawaii-based therapists Judy and Rae of Maui Intensives Inc.
Initially, the love birds told their respective spouses there was no one else involved. But, according to the source close to the couple, Jeff finally admitted to the affair during a late-2018 therapy session with Mackenzie. “She. . . stormed out, and it was a disaster.”
Michael said he expected the story would be a three-week scandal, immediately followed by his sister and Jeff starting their public life together. Instead, the CEO’s head of security, Gavin De Becker, launched an investigation into who had leaked the texts as well as the notorious “dick pics” photos Jeff had sent Lauren.
Michael become suspect No. 1 in the eyes of many. And his sister felt wounded by the accusations.
“I thought Lauren was prepared to be crucified — this always happens to women in a scandal,” he said of the news. “But I called her up and she was sobbing and couldn’t even catch her breath.”
He said he rushed to her home and found Lauren lying on the floor of her bedroom, where he comforted her.
Anonymous sources claimed in the Wall Street Journal that Michael was paid $200,000 by the Enquirer for his participation in the story.
He told The Post: “I’m not going to dignify rumors from anonymous sources, ‘Amazon Investigators’ or men desperately trying to keep themselves out of prison.”
The results of De Becker’s investigation have not been made public.
In a Medium.com post published Feb. 7, Jeff — who also owns the Washington Post — wrote that he had been threatened with “extortion and blackmail” by Howard and AMI. “They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn’t stop our investigation.”
Michael confirms that his relationship with Lauren temporarily suffered after the news broke, despite him revealing to his sister and Jeff that he had worked behind the scenes to “delay, delay, delay” the story breaking.
Now, he said, “I have my life back — away from the circus. My relationship with my sister will be just fine.”