It is, unarguably, one of the defining images of President Trump’s inauguration.
Not a photograph of the triumphant newly minted leader, but a beaming polished-to-tanned-perfection Lauren Sanchez – or perhaps more specifically her eye-popping cleavage, jostling for space in a white underwired bustier top – being ogled by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as his wife Priscilla (clad in a chaste cardigan buttoned up to the neck) remains oblivious.
So arresting was the image of Ms Sanchez – now better known as the fiancée of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – that it launched a thousand memes and many millions more comments, not many of them terribly kind (‘put them away’ being at the more printable end.)
Lauren’s brother Michael also has an opinion on his sister’s choice of attire.
‘Desperate and sleazy,’ he told the Mail this week. ‘I was shocked and embarrassed by Lauren’s ‘me-me-me-look-at-me’ performance.’
Strong sentiments, but then Michael no longer minces his words when it comes to the younger sister to whom he was once so close that, as he reveals, he was initially involved in making plans for her wedding to her new beau.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Lauren’s initial conception of her big day wasn’t exactly understated.
‘We started planning the wedding years back,’ Michael says. ‘It was going to top mine and Lauren’s favourite wedding of past years: the one in the film ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.
‘Jeff and I talked about my idea of the first wedding in space, the monumental PR value of the historic event, and the fact that it would just be insanely cool. But he killed the idea because he said it was ‘too risky’.’
The idea of such a ceremony may seem almost impossibly outlandish – and it should be noted that Michael is something of a controversial character.
Lauren Sanchez, sitting next to husband Jeff Bezos, appears to be oggled by Mark Zuckerberg
Lauren’s brother Michael also has an opinion on his sister’s choice of attire
Indeed, sadly, his relationship with Lauren and Jeff has soured so dramatically that they are no longer on speaking terms and are mired in complicated ongoing legal action – more of that later – stretching back some five ‘painful’ years.
But nonetheless, the question remains: what exactly has happened to his sister’s wedding plans? Nearly two years after Jeff got down on one knee with that £2million pink pear-shaped diamond, when will Lauren become the second Mrs Bezos?
There’s some talk that the delay is down to the pair simply trying to concoct a wedding that’s previously unrivalled in scale, cost and look-at-me grandeur.
After all, the notoriously competitive Jeff – just witness his rivalry with fellow billionaire Elon Musk over whose space rocket is bigger and better – is the man who proposed on the maiden voyage of his $500million superyacht Koru.
It is, of course, the world’s biggest sailing yacht, featuring a busty figurehead on its prow that bears a striking resemblance to Lauren (it is actually based on one of Jeff’s favourite mythological figures, Freyja, the Norse goddess of beauty, love and fertility).
As for Lauren, she has made no secret of the fact that she would like nothing more than to walk up the aisle sharpish: asked during an interview and much derided photoshoot with Vogue magazine a few months after their May 2023 engagement whether she would take her beau’s name, she replied: ‘Uh, yes, one hundred per cent. I am looking forward to being Mrs Bezos.’
In November, during an appearance on the popular network morning show Today, Lauren revealed she had bought her wedding dress, adding: ‘I’m getting to it right now. I’m excited,’ when asked about her plans.
A month later, feverish rumours suggested a snow-filled ceremony was imminent at actor Kevin Costner’s 160-acre Colorado ranch, although, like so many whispers before they came to nothing.
Now online commentators are asking if the wedding will take place before the second anniversary of the couple’s engagement.
That the ceremony did not happen in time for Lauren’s moment in the spotlight at the presidential inauguration would, Michael says, be a source of huge disappointment.
‘Gutted is an understatement,’ says Michael. ‘She and Jeff discussed a swift wedding in 2019 as they wanted to marry immediately and also for the PR value of not being just an affair.’
To refresh minds, Lauren, a former news anchor and reporter who was nominated for an Emmy, was first publicly linked to Jeff, the world’s third-richest man courtesy of his £137billion fortune, in May 2019, when photographers caught them enjoying a romantic date night in New York.
The duo are first said to have met three years earlier in 2016, after being introduced by Lauren’s then husband, talent agent Patrick Whitesell, at an Amazon studios party for the Oscar-winning movie Manchester by the Sea.
That same year, Lauren, a qualified helicopter pilot, had founded Black Ops Aviation, an aerial film and production company.
The following year, she was hired to film footage for Jeff’s private space company Blue Origin. In September 2018, Lauren separated from Patrick, with whom she had two children (she also has a son from a relationship with former NFL star Tony Gonzalez).
Then, in January 2019, Jeff and Mackenzie Scott, his wife of 25 years and with whom he has four children, announced their decision to divorce in a joint tweet.
Six months later, he and Lauren went public together at Wimbledon.
Lauren, a former news anchor, was first publicly linked to Jeff in May 2019
In the months that followed, the couple enjoyed a slew of lavish getaways together, the start of a dating odyssey that has proved to be a veritable A-Z of ‘places rich people visit and things rich people do’ from holidaying on the Caribbean island of St Barts and in St Tropez and attending couture fashion shows to spending time at the series of the gargantuan properties Jeff owns throughout the US, from Miami to Seattle and LA.
Then, in May 2023, it emerged that the billionaire had proposed.
Certainly, there seems no doubt of Jeff’s devotion, if his almost permanent Cheshire cat grin whenever he is photographed with his frequently scantily-clad fiancée is anything to go by. His friends are quick to enthuse on the way Lauren has brought out his playful side.
‘She’s lit him up in the nicest ways. She’s a great stimulant,’ Barry Diller, husband of designer Diane von Furstenberg and great friend of the couple, said in an interview last year. Others in their social circle include Kim Kardashian, her mother Kris Jenner and the singer Katy Perry.
A-list friends and glittering locations aside however, Lauren has been at pains to emphasise the ‘normality’ of her life with Jeff, insisting their priority is their children.
They alternate between LA, where Lauren’s teenage children Evan and Ella are based, and Miami, where Jeff has latterly bought a waterfront property where his four children, who are college age and older, are regular visitors.
Nonetheless, it seems Lauren has struggled to find her niche. While she still occasionally flies one of her stable of helicopters and has become a noted philanthropist, latterly overseeing a donation of $110million to a number of homeless shelters in the Los Angeles area, her forays in other areas have produced mixed results.
In 2022, she started work on The Golden Door, a $2million self-funded feature-length psychological thriller which included a cameo role for one of Jeff’s daughters. Three years on, after rumours of chaos on set and a flurry of staff exits, among them the director of photography, the assistant director and director, there seems no word of a release date. However, Lauren is finding a new director to finish and recut the film before it’s shopped to distributors, according to reports from US entertainment news website Page Six.
A dabble in publishing has proved more successful in the form of children’s book, The Fly That Flew, which according to the blurb ‘takes the reader on a high flying space adventure’ with Flynn the fly.
The book sprang into The New York Times bestseller list following its release last September and has received good reviews, but has also brought its own slice of trouble; a week after its release, it emerged Lauren’s former yoga teacher Alanna Zabel had launched legal action against her without a lawyer, claiming she was the brains behind the idea and that Lauren’s book was ’60 per cent identical’ to hers in context.
She claims she shared her own space-venturing animal story idea with her client over the course of their four-year relationship in the form of a ‘cat who flies to Mars’.
The duo’s working relationship came to an end 15 years ago when, Alanna claimed to the Mail this week, Lauren ‘was jealous’ because she was a better dancer.
‘I drove to her house the next morning, I gave her a cheque for the three remaining classes (she had paid for) and said I don’t deserve this,’ she told the Mail.
She is now seeking an undisclosed amount in compensation, saying she sent Lauren a cease and desist letter before she published her book but she released it anyway. ‘People who are rich think they can do what they want,’ she said, insisting she wants Lauren to be held ‘accountable’.
Lauren is yet to publicly respond as Ms Zabel’s case has been dismissed twice – first for filing in the wrong court and secondly due to disruptions caused by the LA fires. The Hollywood gossip site TMZ noted that several children’s books have been released in 2024 alone about characters venturing into space.
Meanwhile Lauren’s brother, Michael, is attempting to overturn a court declaration preventing him from issuing recordings which, he claims, would clear his name from what he says is a series of unsubstantiated and defamatory claims about their childhood relationship made against him by his sister and her fiancé.
Lauren has continued to do the publicity rounds for her book
Lauren’s lawyer Oliver Rocos previously told the court that the recordings had been illegally obtained, something which is denied by Michael but which was accepted by Judge Mark Young who said ‘Ms Sanchez has an overriding interest in the sealing of these private and illegally recorded conversations’.
Court documents show Michael filed a proof of service on December 6 2024 which the couple claim was ‘false and defective’.
Jeff and Lauren claim the latest legal claim constitutes harassment and have applied to have his claim struck out.
Undeterred by all this unpleasantness, Lauren has continued to do the publicity rounds for her book, touring schools and bookshops, including an outing in October in which she was notably clad in the exactly the same Alexander McQueen suit and bustier outfit she sported this week for President Trump’s inauguration, a fact gleefully pointed out by mischievous online commentators who said that such thrift was evident that pre-nup negotiations were not going well.
(‘Am I the only person talking about how she’s the richest fiancé in the whole world and caught wearing the same outfit twice?’ asked one, prompting another to point out it was actually its third outing as Lauren had posted another picture of herself in the same outfit again in December). In fact, Lauren has actually worn it four times – she also was pictured on the red carpet at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit in September in the white suit and bustier.
Which brings us back to the next occasion where Lauren may be seen in white – her wedding day.
Whenever it happens – and wherever – it is certain to be an eye-popping affair. Could the delay perhaps be, given those early chats with her brother, that a space-themed wedding cannot be ruled out after all?
One certainty is that it won’t be anything less than newsworthy, suitable for someone who has proved adept at garnering headlines.
As Lauren told the hosts of US TV show Today in November, a month before her birthday, her fifties have been quite the adventure.
‘I never thought at 54 that I’d be an author, that I’d be getting married,’ she beamed. ‘At 20 I thought life would be over at 50. Let me tell you, it’s just beginning.’
Of that, at least, there seems little doubt. For Michael however, the prospect of his sister’s nuptials are a more mixed bag.
Lauren’s representatives were contacted for comment.
Additional reporting by Daniel Bates in New York.
