The rock was inevitably enormous. Pink diamond, cushion cut, 30-carat. Estimated cost: $2.5 million. Lauren Sánchez, 55, of Beverly Hills, California, is engaged to Jeff Bezos, 61, of Amazon.com, the third richest man in the world, with a fortune of about $228 billion depending on how you count it. “When he opened the box, I think I blacked out a bit,” she told Vogue of their May 2023 engagement.
The couple will be married in Venice, Italy, most likely on the monastic island of San Giorgio Maggiore, some time between June 26 and June 29 — the full length of their Venetian bender. For richer, for better and in health. Guests are said to include various and interchangeable members of Klan Kardashian, the pop star Katy Perry and her husband, Orlando Bloom, and Bill Gates.
The first public announcement of the couple’s union was similarly sensational, if less traditional. “Bezos’ divorce!” read the front page of the National Enquirer in January 2019. “Text sex and wild romps on his private jet! How he stole another mogul’s wife!” The 11-page exposé quoted messages apparently sent between Sánchez, a helicopter pilot, businesswoman and former TV news anchor, and Bezos during their months-long affair. “I love you, alive girl,” he wrote. “I will show you with my body and my lips and my eyes.”
Bezos announced his divorce from the author MacKenzie Scott, after 25 years of marriage and four children. Sánchez filed for divorce from the Hollywood mega-agent Patrick Whitesell, who is the father of two of her three children.
In the six years since, Bezos and Sánchez have been mocked for their ostentatious displays of wealth and she has been objectified — she was one of the most talked-about guests at President Trump’s inauguration in January, after the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (the second richest person in the world at $231.6 billion) was photographed staring at her cleavage.
In April there was the trip into space, when she and five other women were launched from west Texas to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere on one of Bezos’s Blue Origin rockets wearing skin-tight space suits. Among them was Perry, who said they were “putting the ‘ass’ in astronaut”.
And last month she had a three-day hen do in Paris, which sparked speculation over how the faces of the bride to be and some of her entourage seemed different from before. No doctors or aestheticians were formally credited.
Now the couple are reportedly toning down the bling for the wedding, which is said to be costing less than £10 million, with a guest list of fewer than 200.
But who is Lauren Sánchez? And how did she propel herself into the upper atmosphere of wealth and fame? I spent the past month talking to friends and family, classmates and ex-boyfriends, teachers and former bosses. What I found was a woman who told people she was “going to be somebody” with such conviction that they couldn’t help but think she was right. This is how she worked it.
‘She always wanted to be famous’
Wendy Lorraine Sánchez was born on December 19, 1969, in Albuquerque — at the same hospital, coincidentally, where Bezos came into the world six years earlier (his family later moved to Texas and then Florida).
The youngest of three, Sánchez has two brothers, Michael and Paul. Their mother, Eleanor, was clerk of the city council, and their father, Ray, was a pilot and mechanic who went on to own an aviation business. One schoolfriend remembers her referring to him as “my dad the pilot”.
When she was seven her parents divorced, after which she lived with her mother in Albuquerque. Her father stayed in the city, remarried and had a daughter, Elena, giving Sánchez a half-sister when she was 13.
Sánchez talks often about being third-generation Mexican-American and friends remember her mother and maternal grandmother, Elsie, speaking to one another in Spanish at home. Sánchez, however, was not taught the language — her mother “worried” that she would get an accent, she said in an interview with Elle magazine. “She thought that would hurt me.”
She has said she “came from nothing”, telling The Hollywood Reporter: “I used to sleep in the back of my grandmother’s car when she would go clean houses.”
Her brother Michael, 60, from whom she is now estranged, recalls a less modest upbringing. “Our parents were successful and wealthy,” he tells me over email, adding that their grandmother ran a local restaurant and was a “ legendary bookie” as well as a “racehorse owner”.
“Lauren always wanted to be famous. Period,” he says.
• Lauren Sánchez: How I became the future Mrs Bezos
The cheerleader and beauty queen
In Albuquerque the family lived in a house in Academy Acres, a middle-class suburb, and later Rio Grande Estates, one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in the city. Eleanor, who had grown up in Los Angeles, was known for her poise and style. Today she still owns a number of small properties in Albuquerque. Her tenants say she is a good landlord, and glamorous. She drops in once a year wearing enormous sunglasses and they send their cheques to an address in Beverly Hills, zip code 90210.
Sánchez, who was known to everyone as Wendy, attended a Catholic elementary school and then Del Norte High in Albuquerque. As a teenager she drove a two-door convertible red MG MGB, given to her by her parents, with the number plate “Wendy 1”.
She was a cheerleader at high school. “She was one of the most energetic and exuberant people at the school,” says her classmate Kevin Gant, 56. “She bounced.”
Michelle Montaño-Espinoza, 55, who was one of Sánchez’s closest friends and on the cheerleading squad with her, says she wanted to be on TV. “She said she was going to be a weather girl. She would mimic, ‘Hi, this is Wendy Rain!’ We got a real kick out of that.” She always followed the latest trends. “I remember going to the department store and her mom bought her make-up from Shiseido,” Montaño-Espinoza says. “I just thought, oh wow! I was buying make-up at Walgreens [the chemist].” Dinner at the Sánchez home was similarly stylish. “It was the first time I ever ate an artichoke.”
As a teen Sánchez competed in beauty pageants and let friends borrow her clothes. I met two people who say they wore her pageant dresses on prom night, the first a white strapless number with a sweetheart neckline, the second red taffeta. Her hair was big, blow-dried and then curled with an iron, all held in place with Aqua Net hairspray, and her outfits always matched. She would arrive at school in heels, some a little too big, clacking down the corridor as her feet slipped out of the backs.
Boys took notice. “Let’s just say, if she wanted somebody, she was going to go straight after them,” says Cherie Sadler Mann, 55, a friend who went skiing with Sánchez a few times in Santa Fe as teenagers. “She was so charming that she left all of us thinking, well, shit, if you’ve got it, why not?”
One of the jocks Sánchez dated “on and off” was Ian Smelser, 55, a star of the Del Norte High American football team and now an investigator for the city authorities in Albuquerque. “She could pretty much get who she wanted,” Smelser says. He and Montaño-Espinoza are now a couple.
“Boys found Wendy attractive and the girls were either drawn to her or pushed away — mostly out of jealousy,” he says. She was voted “biggest flirt” in their yearbook.
Tom Wade, 55, was one of the guys she dated in an “off” period from Smelser. “I was one of the better football players in New Mexico and she was one of the prettier girls in New Mexico, so it was one of those things that just happened,” he says over the phone, taking a break from a clattering building site in Oklahoma, where he lives and has a property company.
They spent much of their time driving around in his car, a GMC pick-up, talking. “So many high school girls, especially if they’re dating the football star, can’t handle the conversation — they’re just happy to be there,” Wade says. “But I remember having lots of in-depth conversations with Wendy about my dreams and aspirations, and she would truly listen.” They broke up at The Beach, a waterpark where Sánchez had a job.
‘You’re not dumb, you’re just dyslexic’
In class, however, Sánchez was less secure in her abilities. She has said she got “lost in the school system” due to undiagnosed dyslexia. I approached a number of teachers who taught her, none of whom remembers anything particular about her, just that she was there.
She graduated from high school in the summer of 1987 and enrolled in an acting and speech programme at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Around that time she won prizes at the local Miss Hawaiian Tropic pageant.
At about the age of 19 Sánchez started dating Gavin Maloof, 13 years her senior and from one of the richest families in Albuquerque. Maloof, 68, talks to me from Las Vegas, during a break from a slot tournament. How did the two meet? “Because she was hot,” he says, laughing. “She’s still hot! She’s always been hot!”
He still seems totally taken by Sánchez and remembers “a good person”. “Wendy always said, ‘I’m going to be somebody,’ ” he says. “Boy, was she right. She was a hard worker, make no mistake about it.”
At the time Sánchez also charged around town with Annmarie Ferrari, another young socialite. “They had Albuquerque by the balls,” says Toni Ferrari, 51, Annmarie’s younger sister. “Those two could walk into any room and command it. They never got parking tickets, they never got speeding tickets, it was hysterical. I was, like, have men never seen women before?”
Was Sánchez a known name around town? “Abso-frickin’-lutely,” she says. “She was drop-dead gorgeous and determined beyond belief. She was always getting out [of Albuquerque]. I never saw her staying.”
After Annmarie took her own life in her early twenties in 1992, Sánchez stayed in touch with the family for some years.
Several years earlier, at the age of 20, Sánchez had moved to Los Angeles, where her mother served as assistant deputy mayor. Sánchez applied to be a flight attendant with Southwest Airlines. “Back then they weighed you, and I weighed 121 pounds,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “They said, ‘You need to be 115.’ ” These days, she said, she would respond differently. “I don’t want to be a stewardess. I want to be the pilot!”
Instead, in 1990, she won a place on a two-year journalism course at El Camino College in south Los Angeles. “She sat in the very front row,” says Lori Medigovich, 67, her tutor. She would always approach guest speakers and ask for their business cards. “She was a force of nature.” Medigovich soon noticed, however, that Sánchez was “transposing letters and words in sentences”. She suggested getting tested for dyslexia.
Sánchez recently recalled being told by the clinician: “You’re not dumb. You’re just dyslexic.” “Before, she seemed overwhelmed, withdrawn, like there was a dark cloud hanging over her head,” Medigovich says. “After that she seemed like a completely different person.”
The TV dream comes true
And so Sánchez ploughed on. She won a scholarship on the communications course at the University of Southern California, where she studied between 1992 and 1994, but dropped out before graduating. She had acquired an agent, Ken Lindner, a notable name in the newscasting world, and got a job as a reporter at KTVK-TV in Phoenix, Arizona. She was 25.
Phil Alvidrez, 71, the director of news who hired her, describes her as “fearless”. “She took on whatever we threw at her” — from house fires to sports events. One assignment took her to the 1994 Phoenix Open, a golf tournament where, according to her former cameraman Mike Schmidt, 61, she interviewed the basketball legend Michael Jordan and the singer-songwriter Vince Gill, who were paired in a charity round.
“We got plenty from the interview, so we were just watching them tee off,” Schmidt recalls. “Until we hear, ‘Wendy!’ It was Vince, calling for her to walk with them. And that was the money shot — Wendy in the middle, Vince grabbing one of her hands and Michael Jordan grabbing the other, the three of them walking down the fairway.”
Later that day there was a knock on the window of their truck, Schmidt says. It was one of Jordan’s bodyguards, asking Sánchez to join them at a sports bar that night. “She was very charming, very attractive,” Schmidt says. “She knew how to work it.”
In 1997, aged 28, Sánchez landed a job as a correspondent at Extra, a celebrity and gossip TV show filmed in Los Angeles. She started going by the name Lauren, apparently because Wendy Sánchez was too similar to the name of another anchor. Just over a year later she moved to Fox Sports News, where she and her show, Going Deep, earned an Emmy nomination for an investigation into the dangers of aluminium baseball bats.
One night in 1999, Steve Cohen, news director at another LA station, KCOP-TV, received a tape from Sánchez’s agent. “And there she was,” he says. “Beautiful, gorgeous and there’s just this energy flowing from her.” Cohen invited her to lunch at the Beverly Hills hotel. “She walks across the room like she owns it.” Two days later he got her into the studio for a screen test.
At 30 years old she landed her first job as an anchor, on KCOP’s 10pm news alongside “legacy anchor” Rick Chambers. Ratings-wise it was “hit city”, Cohen says. By 31 she’d won an Emmy for her work there.
Around 2000 she broke off her engagement to the NFL star Anthony Miller, according to an interview in the Daily Mail. She then had a relationship with another NFL player, Tony Gonzalez, with whom she had her first child, Nikko, in February 2001.
By the following year her relationship with Gonzalez had ended and Sánchez was dating the actor Henry Simmons from NYPD Blue. She’d seen him at an event, “knew he was someone on TV”, she told Television Week, and “walked right up to him”. Five months later they were engaged.
A single mum in the era of ‘hot news’
Sánchez would get up early, often taking Nikko to the studio with her. “Growing up it did feel like it was me and her against the world,” he told Vogue in 2023. He is now 24 and a model.
His mother was part of a new era of news TV: slick and entertaining — and Sánchez and her cohort of female newscasters were raising eyebrows. In 2003 she became guest anchor on Fox 11’s Good Day LA, appearing on the cover of the lads’ mag Open Your Eyes with the headline “America’s hottest news anchor!”; she featured in the Hot Bodies issue of Us Weekly; and performed at the Pussycat Dolls Burlesque Saloon in Las Vegas.
While the tabloids drooled, the critics piled in — the LA Times calling her show “newscast for lobotomies”. “I’m diverted by the teleprompter being reflected in her lips,” wrote the paper’s TV critic. KCOP’s Cohen calls the reaction a sexist backlash disguised as intellectual snobbery. “The modern American woman changed through the years,” he says. “The standard, serious and shall I say dowdy anchor changed as women did. Lauren was a modern woman and looked like the gals she hung out with out of work.”
Two years after her engagement to Simmons, Sánchez announced her betrothal to Patrick Whitesell, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and a partner at the Endeavor Talent Agency. I am told they met at the Hollywood hotspot Las Palmas. They bought an $11 million estate in Beverly Hills (just up the hill from Bezos’s home with MacKenzie Scott) and were married in August 2005. A number of Whitesell’s clients were among the wedding guests, including the actors Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba and Hugh Jackman, who sang Mack the Knife.
“Matt and Ben don’t get to see each other often,” Sánchez told People magazine at the time, referring to Damon and Affleck. “So we sat them together.” The party planner described the kiss at the altar as “long”, after which the couple danced a “sexy rumba”.
Shortly before the wedding she had hosted the first season of So You Think You Can Dance, but was replaced by the British presenter Cat Deeley for season two. She later said in an interview that she was “fired because I was pregnant”. Fox Broadcasting denied the allegations.
At 37, in 2006, Sánchez had her second son, Evan, now 19, and two years after that a daughter, Ella, now 17. In 2009 Sánchez went back to Extra as a weekend anchor, then in 2011 moved back to Good Day LA as a co-host, where she remained for six years.
At 40 she received her fixed-wing pilot’s licence and trained to become a certified helicopter pilot. “My dad helped me find an instructor in California and I remember the instructor saying, ‘Your dad’s a pilot, your mom’s a pilot. You must know a lot about aircraft,’ ” Sánchez told People magazine. “And I said, ‘The only thing I know is to stay away from the propeller.’ He goes, ‘OK, we have a lot of work to do here.’” But she was soon hooked. “I get this 25-year-old, gorgeous instructor and I was, like, ‘I’m paying attention now.’ ”
Sánchez flew above the Hollywood sign, above her son’s football practice at school, along the Malibu coastline. It was, she said, one of the only places she felt “almost entirely in control”. In 2016 she founded Black Ops Aviation, an aerial film and production company, operating a twin-engine Bell 429 and a single-engine Eurocopter AS350 Écureuil. Black Ops has worked with the Academy Award-winner Christopher Nolan on Dunkirk, among other projects. Aaron Fitzgerald, a specialist pilot who worked with the company, calls Sánchez “a person of action — and she inspires that in others”.
She is one of the few women doing the job. “Working is part of my DNA,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I enjoy it.”
The affair that changed everything
But it was her affair with Bezos that turned her from LA name into global household name. “The untold story of sleazy Amazon founder,” the National Enquirer headline read. The following month Bezos accused the Enquirer of “extortion” and “blackmail”, as it threatened to publish nude photos of him. Michael Sánchez, Sánchez’s estranged brother, then attempted to sue Bezos for defamation, claiming the Amazon founder falsely accused him of providing the nude photos to the tabloid. The judge ruled in favour of Bezos.
Legal wrangling aside, Sánchez posted lots of photos of the couple looking loved up, out at dinner in co-ordinated floral prints, or appearing on red carpets with his newly bulging biceps on display.
“I always found it interesting that people say, ‘Well, Lauren, you definitely dress more for men,’” she told Vogue. “I actually dress for myself.” “But it works for Jeff,” Bezos said with a smile. He bought her a coffee mug from Amazon that reads “Woke up sexy as hell again”.
According to the American tabloid Us Weekly, the two were introduced by Whitesell, encouraged to work with one another on a documentary.
There is a figurehead on the bow of his superyacht, a voluptuous nude woman. When asked whether it was her, she told Vogue: “I’m very flattered, but it’s not.” In fact it is Freyja, Norse goddess of love, fertility, war and gold. “If it was me ” She gestured an even larger pair of breasts.
For Bezos it has been a marked change. “He used to look geeky, with the khaki pants and dress shirts,” says Joseph Rosenfeld, a personal style adviser with clients in Silicon Valley and New York. “Now he’s in sunglasses, leather jackets and skin-tight, smooth tees, over an entirely new, gym-honed body. This complete emergence from relative style obscurity has overlapped with his new relationship, no question.”
Sánchez defines herself as a philanthropist and is vice-chair of the Bezos Earth Fund; she works closely with the Bezos Academy, a network of tuition-free preschools, and the Bezos Day One Fund. “I always found her to have quite a magnetic and strong presence,” says Fiona McRaith, a senior adviser at the Earth Fund until last year. “And really engaged and curious about everything.”
And what of the wedding, taking place in the historical epicentre of extravagance, opulence and gaucheness: Venice. “It’s going to be on a par with a G7,” one Venetian official told The Times. Will she be taking her husband’s surname, she was asked by Vogue. “Uh, yes, 100 per cent,” she said. “I am looking forward to being Mrs Bezos.”
• How Venice saw off rivals to host Jeff Bezos’s ‘wedding of the century’
Michael Sánchez says he has not seen his sister since 2019 and not spoken to her since 2020, the legal battle over the leaking of the affair story creating an irreparable fissure. He says their mother, Eleanor, asked to meet with her to “discuss” the situation and the two have not spoken since. Neither he nor their mother are invited to the wedding, he says.
It is understood that her father, Ray, whom she still visits in Albuquerque, her brother Paul and half-sister, Elena, will attend. Elena was one of the 12 women who went to the three-day hen in Paris.
And now she is joining a new family, the Bezoses — one that happens to be one of the world’s wealthiest. Out of the dozens of people I’ve spoken to for this story, nobody, apart from her brother perhaps, has resented her success. They talked of her magnetism and charm. “Force of nature”, as she is known among her friends and family.
Mrs Bezos? We have lift-off.
