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In 2016, Lauren Sánchez, then 46, was flying high. The daughter of an aviation specialist, she had a helicopter pilots’ license but had found herself wanting more. She wasn’t tight on cash — she was married to Patrick Whitesell, a Hollywood superagent known for helping launch the careers of such talent as Ben Affleck and Matt Damon — and she purchased an Astar chopper, a famously tricky aircraft, nicknamed the Squirrel because of how dodgy it feels to land. Then she sought out Steve Stafford, an Astar expert, for advanced training. Stafford had never before encountered a woman who wanted to fly the Squirrel. Learning the proper techniques was grueling work, but Sánchez was unfazed. “I really couldn’t believe her energy level,” he said. “She just never ran out of gas. I mean, if she could take a helicopter and fly it to the surface of the moon, she’d do that.”
Back on land, Sánchez would soon prove similarly unshakeable. Sometime in the coming months, she would begin an extramarital relationship with Jeff Bezos. By the summer of 2018, when Bezos had become the richest man on earth, Sánchez’s estranged brother, Michael, was in conversations with the Enquirer, arranging to publish private text messages between the illicit couple. When the lid finally blew off, that January, Sánchez appeared steady and smiling. She and Bezos leaned headfirst into the attention, and this is the way the pair has lived since: publicly, proudly, and with pomp — as though to get ahead of their own tailwind.
When the affair first came to light, Bezos was still married to MacKenzie Scott, the brainy and discreet Princeton alum with whom he shared four children, who’d helped him get Amazon off the ground back in 1994. Sánchez, who had three children of her own — two with Whitesell and one with her ex-boyfriend, the former NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez — was a sharp pivot. A broadcaster and a glitzed-up woman about town in Hollywood, she was an easy target for anyone prone to slinging gold-digger accusations. Amazon shareholders were spooked by news of the scandal, and the company’s stock price fell 5 percent. The whole thing seemed likely to be a short-lived, tawdry incident.
The couple, however, doubled down, announcing their respective divorces and setting out on a world tour of PDA and aggressively good times. There they were, enjoying burgers and pizza together in the West Village. There they were, canoodling behind the royals at Wimbledon. There they were, in the prime-center orchestra seats of Hadestown on Broadway. The couple became so ubiquitous that by 2020, they could go to happy hour at Tribeca watering hole Weather Up and enjoy drinks without attracting much of a fuss.
Next week, the Sánchez-Bezos scandal will finally be reborn as a blessed union. The exact location of the ceremony has yet to be confirmed, but it will reportedly take place in the vicinity of the San Giorgio Maggiore Island in Venice — where, according to local news, the two have booked dozens of the city’s water taxis, as well as its most lavish hotels, including the Gritti Palace and Aman.
Some see it all as a coup for Sánchez. “This seems, to me, to be the pinnacle of a long career of social climbing,” said Matt Belloni, the Hollywood reporter behind the podcast The Town and the entertainment newsletter “What I’m Hearing,” from Puck. “She did it. She made it.”
But Sánchez is not just any arriviste. She is, by many accounts, an untamable force: her drive met by equal charm, sociability, and intelligence. One Hollywood producer I spoke with compared her and her ex-husband Whitesell: He was “charming … but as vapid as you can get.” Sánchez, on the other hand, well, “I would go to basketball games with her, and think … Okay, she can hang out. She could talk.”
Speaking to those in her orbit, it sounds as though Sánchez is almost mystically magnetic, and it becomes less surprising that an extremely powerful man would send her texts that could embarrass the internet for weeks. In a missive during the affair, Bezos had written: “I love you, alive girl.”
Though men in the throes of infatuation commonly see their new lovers as uniquely … aspirant, Sánchez is an “alive” (apologies) “girl” — a uniquely energetic 55-year-old woman. And rather than tame her image in her years of dating Bezos — perhaps to match that of the stately tech partner, à la MacKenzie Scott or Laurene Powell Jobs — Sánchez has become ever more herself, bringing Bezos along for the ride. Everything in their joint universe is Big, Bigger, Biggest. Flying private has been usurped by space travel. The skirts of the designer gowns are doubly voluminous. Garden-variety charitable donations have been bested by wealth pledges. Say what you will about the conflicts inherent in being a climate activist who takes a bunch of famous people on a 11-minute joyride across the Kármán line, but there seems to be no question: Sánchez knows how to have fun.
Bezos meanwhile, has been transformed in her presence. It is difficult to remember what he was like before he met Sánchez. In 2015, his net worth was a humble $47 billion, and he had only recently cracked the top-ten richest men. He was, like so many tech tycoons, a slightly awkward-seeming middle-aged man, with a boyish interest in outer space. He was straightforwardly boring: This was the brown-cardboard-box guy. Most of his public appearances were at economic forums and product launches. But by 2023, when the couple appeared together in a cheeky but warm Vogue profile and photo shoot, Bezos was the kind of dude willing to whip up margaritas for a reporter and be photographed in a cowboy hat. These days, he’s jacked, and often photographed shirtless and jubilant. Though he’s now 61, his face, like Sánchez’s, has begun to look suspiciously smooth.
With Amazon, and the abundance of homebound convenience it has conditioned us to, there is arguably no one who has done more to tamp down Americans’ spirit of adventure than Bezos. And yet Jeff has joined the whirling dervish of Lauren, perhaps finding a personal antidote to the ennui of the digital age, or of aging itself.
“I think Jeff is dazzled by Lauren,” said Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey, one of Sánchez’s friends and former Vice President of news at Fox. Who wouldn’t be?
Sánchez has always had big, roving ambitions. Born into a third-generation Mexican American family in Albuquerque, she struggled in school and nearly flunked out of college until a conscientious professor pointed out that she might be dyslexic. Transferring to USC, she pursued broadcast journalism, where the written word couldn’t hold her back. In the mid-’90s, she started reporting for a local news station in Phoenix, and soon she was interviewing for bigger gigs in Los Angeles. Though Sánchez was green, Gregorisch-Dempsey knew she could be a reporting asset. “Even then,” years before Sánchez married Whitesell and got access to his rolodex, Gregorisch-Dempsey said, “she had contacts. She knew people.”
Another of her former producers, Lisa Kridos, said Sánchez was a natural on air and had her sights set, early on, on “Good Day L.A.,” the Los Angeles morning show on Fox. “She really wanted to be on, badly,” Kridos said. “It was, like, the talk of the town. It was the show that all the celebrities watched. If you were on Good Day L.A., that was a place to become famous.” Sánchez got the gig, a co-hosting role, in 1999. Later, Gregorisch-Dempsey hired her as a special correspondent and then a regular co-anchor on Extra TV, the national entertainment-news show.
In all her roles, Sánchez was known for being gamely. Once, while at Good Day L.A., she was struggling with the sleep training of her and Whitesell’s infant son, and she volunteered to shoot a segment at their home with a sleep expert, the baby crying it out in the background. A couple years later, while studying to get her helicopter-pilot’s license, she signed up to report on the weather on-air: Understanding meteorology would help her pass the test. One day, she asked producer Michelle Pulfrey, “What if we went skydiving, live?” Sánchez pulled it off—wearing a hot-pink flight suit. “No one had ever done it before on local news,” Pulfrey told me. Sánchez also shrewdly leveraged her husband’s Hollywood connections to score interviews with celebrities, such as Hugh Jackman, who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to do a local news segment.
Outside work, Sánchez lived like an A-lister. When she and Whitesell first tied the knot in 2005, his friends and acquaintances privately noted their shock. Whitesell had a history of dating models and starlets and hadn’t seemed poised to settle down anytime soon. But Sánchez changed all that. Whitesell was an executive chairman at the Endeavor talent agency, alongside Ari Emmanuel, which put him — and Sánchez — in constant proximity to film and television royalty. Sánchez acted the part.
“Her life was always pretty big, you know?” Pulfrey said. “She was at Oscars parties with Patrick.” Often when she wrapped for the day on Good Day L.A., she would corral some female colleagues to go out shopping and dining. “She and Jillian Barberie” — her co-host — “would come in at four or five a.m. and be done working by 11,” Pulfrey said. “And then it was, like, shopping and lunch at Barney’s. Soho House had just opened. She’s the one who’s like, ‘Guys, let’s go to this fun new spot.’” Sánchez had an uncanny ability to lock in on whomever she was with. “Everybody knew Lauren,” Pulfrey said. “But she acted like we were the only people in the room, and that’s where all her attention was.”
This ability was not lost on her bosses, nor were her looks. Sánchez was a natural raven-haired beauty with a Sports Illustrated–cover body. When Extra got an interview with former president Bill Clinton shortly after a coronary procedure in 2010, it sent Sánchez. “I’m not going to say she wasn’t a secret weapon,” Gregorisch-Dempsey said. “Did I send her out on all the very big interviews with men? Yes. But you know, she wasn’t there to seduce them. She was there to do a good interview.” Still, she was obviously beguiling. In her interview with Clinton, Gregorisch-Dempsey recalled, she asked, “How do you go from, like, feeling ill, to feeling like you are right now?” Clinton stared back. “His eyes …” Gregorisch-Dempsey said, trailing off. “He is just taken by her.”
Sánchez’s charisma was still not enough to propel her to A-list status — not yet. In 2005, she was hired to host the first season of Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance? but her stint was lackluster — she confused one contestant’s boyfriend for her father — and she was replaced for season two. At one point, she shot a talent-show pilot with American Idol’s Randy Jackson that was never picked up, according to a producer who was set to work on the program. In 2009, doing the weather on-air for Good Day L.A., Sánchez was needled by the anchor Steve Edwards. He ran through a list of all her failed gigs: “How about So You Think You Can Dance?” “Oh, I killed that one too,” Sánchez said with a chuckle. “I am the buzzkill of every show.”
Sánchez’s dream was to host The View, and in the early aughts, she filled in as a co-host occasionally. She auditioned twice for a full-time spot and didn’t make the cut. “She was disappointed,” Pulfrey said, “but she was always like, Next move. She was just an energizer bunny of a human. She was always crossing something off the list that she felt challenged by.”
Eventually, Sánchez moved away from broadcasting and set her sights skyward, forming a production company called Black Ops Aviation, which advised filmmakers shooting aerial scenes. This was no small undertaking — there are only about 11 such companies in the United States. In order to do business, Stafford told me, Sánchez needed to obtain a special approval from the FAA. She mastered the requirements in two months. Whitesell’s connections might have helped Black Ops get hired on Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award–winning film Dunkirk, but Sánchez had the exceedingly rare qualifications to execute.
Around this time, at a lunch with Belloni, who was then the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, Sánchez pitched the idea of a story on herself. “She sits up straight, and she’ll brush her hair back and take the aviators off and stare right at you,” Belloni said. “She dishes. She will ask fun questions. She’s a consummate talker.” The lunch worked — The Hollywood Reporter ran a profile on Sánchez and Black Ops.
In 2016, Bezos was ramping up Amazon Studios and rubbing elbows in Hollywood for the first time. That December, he hosted a party for Manchester by the Sea, the Kenneth Lonergan film Amazon Studios had acquired — the company’s crown jewel, which would become the first-ever Academy Award–nominated film to be distributed by a streaming service. The party was attended by Whitesell and Sánchez, and the event is often cited as the genesis of the Bezos-Sánchez relationship.
It was two years later that Lauren’s brother Michael, a recreationally loose-lipped manager of D-list entertainers, leaked the news of the affair to the Enquirer, which ran an 11-page exposé. Amid the fracas, the question of why Michael had access to his sister’s intimate texts with Bezos went unanswered. But Michael and his collaborators at the tabloid were such unsavory characters that Bezos and Sánchez came away the moral victors.
Sánchez made sure to seize her moment. Previously, she’d reported on celebrity news: Now, she was the news. Over the next few years, she courted attention, developing a friendly relationship with the paparazzi. When they showed up, she made sure to be warm and dolled-up. Jesal Parshotam, a paparazzo who has shot Sánchez and Bezos all around the globe, told me, “They are not, like, pretentious or stuck-up.” He added, “I think that Sánchez seems more down to earth than Bezos, and I feel like that’s rubbed off on him.”
One could argue that Sánchez’s gravity has also pulled attention to the rest of the tech-billionaire set. Prior to her relationship with Bezos, the paparazzi didn’t have much use for Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. “Before, we would never bother shooting Bezos coming off of a private jet,” said Parshotam. They would nab him, maybe, the day after a major jump in Amazon’s stock price. “Mark Zuckerberg,” he said, “would be on the boogie board in Hawaii with sunscreen all over his face, and no one would go out to shoot him.” But Sánchez changed the field.
“She’s very clever,” Parshotam said. “She just gets the game.”
For one birthday in recent years, Bezos threw Sánchez a “tabloid-themed” blowout bash — a nod to her journalistic background, maybe, but also to her obsession with the press and its obsession with her. Almost certainly she was in on the joke.
Last year, Sánchez returned to The View as a guest. She was ostensibly there to promote her new children’s book, The Fly Who Flew to Space, but really, she was present as an object of prurient public fascination. “I’m a little nervous, I have to tell you,” she said, when she sat down alongside the hosts. “My hands were shaking back there.” Her sister, she said, who’d been with her backstage, had reminded her, “‘You’re not auditioning this time. You’re a guest.’” If she was demoralized to return in that role, she didn’t show it — she seemed happy simply to have arrived.
At the start of the segment, producers played old clips of Sánchez from her days guest hosting the show, when she’d often been styled like Charlotte York by way of Monica Belucci. As the women reminisced, host Sara Haines chimed in: “And somehow, you haven’t aged a day.” It sounded sincere, but no one responded; the blunder was too loaded.
Even if the hosts had lingered on the third-rail topic of Sánchez’s looks, however, Sánchez probably would have found a way to breeze by it. Snickering about her appearance — online, on pop-culture podcasts, in magazines — has become an American bloodsport. The MAGA crowd ripped into Sánchez for the indecency of her cleavage at the presidential inauguration. (Megyn Kelly, on January 21: “She dresses like a prostitute. She looked like a hooker.”) Last year, the restaurateur Keith McNally turned Sánchez and Bezos into a running bit on his Instagram, regularly posting photos of the couple with captions like “Does anybody else find Lauren Sanchez ABSOLUTELY REVOLTING?”
Under this quality of light, Sánchez, unsurprisingly, has become aware of how she’s perceived. In 2023, when Vogue asked her if the bodacious figurehead on Bezos’s superyacht was modeled after her, she had a knowing reply, implying that any sculpture of her would need bigger breasts.
Sánchez has gained access to some of the most exclusive circles in the world, but her welcome among elites is tenuous, conditional. “I think it’s very obvious that she wants to be a fashion girl,” one fashion publicist who’s worked at major houses told me. “But just look back on how many runway shows she’s shown up to.” It was true; though she’s been featured in Vogue, and is, in the publicist’s words, “almost certainly a huge private client at some of these houses,” you won’t find Sánchez seated next to Anna Wintour at Fashion Week anytime soon.
The fashion brands who have embraced Sánchez — Oscar de la Renta and Dolce & Gabbana — are those that have already crossed the political Rubicon. “Dolce is probably the most problematic fashion brand out there,” the publicist said. “Dolce and Oscar don’t care. They’re dressing the Trump family. I think it’s pretty indicative that those are the brands that want to work with her.”
Sánchez, in some respects, represents the aesthetic and moral pinnacle of the Mar-a-Lago era. Though she spearheads an organization dedicated to reuniting families at the border and speaks often about climate change, she seems to undermine those aims at almost every public-facing turn — expanding her massive carbon footprint and appearing alongside Bezos as he’s tried to curry favor with Trump. The couple’s joint philanthropic choices seem to be dubious, at best. Last year, they awarded Sánchez’s pal Eva Longoria $50 million through their vaguely defined “Courage and Civility” prize.
These moves have allowed critics to bolster their superficial distaste for Sánchez with moral disdain. After her lacy bra-top and blazer at the inauguration, liberal commentators scrutinized her for buying into the MAGA spectacle. And the press tour for Sánchez’s stunt-y all-female Blue Origin flight turned into a full-blown pile-on, joined by the actresses Olivia Wilde and Olivia Munn — who’ve both mingled with Sánchez socially in the past.
“She takes the high road, but I know it stings,” said Gregorisch-Dempsey. She’s also trying to take control of the narrative. Recently, Sánchez has started palling around with Kim Kardashian. Not long ago, she parted ways with her former publicist, Stephanie Jones (one of the central figures of the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively saga) and hired one of the PR firms Kardashian uses.
Like Kardashian, Sánchez is relentlessly positive on social media. In February, in the wake of all the inauguration talk, she allowed a smidgen of distress to creep into public view — only to use it as a launchpad. “Some years start off with turbulence,” she wrote on Instagram, with a selfie in the cockpit of a helicopter, “but that’s just the wind reminding you to spread your wings. Here’s to flying farther than we ever imagined.”
In a matter of days, Sánchez will become Mrs. Bezos. Some 200-odd guests will descend upon Venice to celebrate her and her husband-to-be — but mostly her. Oprah Winfrey, Barry Diller, Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian, and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are all reportedly among the invitees. By the end of the festivities, Lauren will likely be richer than them all.
But for such a restless soul, a psychological hazard may be lurking in the wake of the wedding. On one hand, she’s made it. On the other, she’s made it. Will there be a comedown? And where does all that ambition go now? The smart money says her zeal will be unleashed on Bezos’s kingdom. Think of the access — to fortune, to business, to politics. The connections! Bezos better hold on.