Billionaire Jeff Bezos is being sued by his girlfriend's brother for defamation, TIME reports.
Michael Sanchez accused the richest man on earth of telling the media that he gave naked photos of Bezos to The National Enquirer, which created rumors that have made life difficult for him.
Last year, the billionaire wrote a Medium post claiming that the Enquirer's publisher AMI was attempting to blackmail him by threatening that they would publish "intimate" photos of him and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez. AMI reportedly paid Michael Sanchez $200,000 for the texts, which included "a naked selfie in a bathroom" and a "below the belt selfie."
Bezos' lawyers claim that he's being extorted by Sanchez's lawsuit and are trying to have the entire case thrown out. "Mr. Sanchez’s defamation claim fails the most basic of requirements: it fails to identify any instance in which Defendants, or even any news report, published or made any of the alleged statements about him,” the filing reads, CNBC reports.
"Extortion rears its head again in this lawsuit, this time not only aimed at Defendants but also directly threatening speech protected under the First Amendment," the filingcontinued. "By filing this lawsuit, Mr. Sanchez hopes to put himself back on the front pages and extract money from Defendants by leveraging the current media environment to harass them. But no matter what Michael Sanchez says or how many times he repeats himself, at the heart of his Complaint lies the same public controversy he helped generate and has tried to exploit—and from which he surreptitiously earned $200,000."
