【18+ Archives】

It sure looks like Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman spent some time poking around Jeff Bezos' private business after the Amazon CEO's phone was reportedly hacked.

According to the New York Times8+ Archives investigators have pieced together a timeline and determined that, after the hack, the Saudis learned about Bezos' private affair with Lauren Sanchez.

In the spring of 2018, about a month after first meeting bin Salman at a dinner in Los Angeles and exchanging numbers with him, Bezos received a video from bin Salman's number on WhatsApp that featured "an image of Saudi and Swedish flags overlaid with Arabic text." After that, investigators note, "the amount of data exiting his phone increased almost three hundredfold."

While the report doesn't say whether or not Bezos clicked the video, investigators suggest he did, giving bad actors access to his phone. And two messages sent later by the the crown prince suggest he used the hack to look at Bezos' private information.

The first message was from November 2018, in which the crown prince sent a meme to Bezos that featured "a woman who strongly resembled Lauren Sanchez," according to the Times. Sanchez was the woman with whom Bezos was having an affair with at the time of the message.

The text of the image read, “Arguing with a woman is like reading the software license agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree.”

Apparently, not even the crown prince of Saudi Arabia can withstand the allure of stale, outdated, "Women, am I right?" jokes.

Still, the affair was private and only someone who had access to Bezos' private messages would have known about it, according to the report.

Bezos and wife MacKenzie announced their divorce in January 2019 but it wasn't until two months later that his affair with Sanchez became public. Then, in February 2019, Bezos published a blog post that claimed the National Enquirerwas trying to extort him over text messages and dick pics related to his affair.

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In his open letter about the extortion attempt, Bezos accused David Pecker, the head of American Media, Inc (AMI), which owns the Enquirer, of pursuing some shady business deals with Saudi Arabia. Bezos also mentioned that Pecker, a close ally of President Donald Trump (who also had a cozy relationship with bin Salman), was "apoplectic" over coverage from the Bezos-owned Washington Postof the October 2018 murder of Postcolumnist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly on bin Salman's orders.

(It's also worth noting that, in late March 2019, Gavin De Becker, one of Bezos' investigators, re-emphasized Saudi Arabia's roll in the extortion attempt in an op-ed in The Daily Beast.)

All of this had unfolded when the second message that investigators flagged was sent. On Feb. 14, 2019, Bezos reportedly had phone calls with advisors about the alleged campaign against him from Saudi Arabia. Two days after the call, bin Salman slid into Bezos' DMs with the message, “there is nothing against you or Amazon from me or Saudi Arabia.”

While it's true this could be a coincidence given the public nature of Bezos' accusations at this point, investigators still noted the timing.

For its part, Saudi Arabia is claiming it had nothing to do with any of this, of course.

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We've also reached out to Amazon for comment on the new report.