Lauren Sánchez Bezos is facing renewed scrutiny over claims made in a lawsuit by her former yoga instructor and one-time friend Alanna Zabel, who alleges that Sánchez once spoke openly about finding former US president Bill Clinton “so sexy and mesmerizing” and was jokingly referred to as “Monica” in a reference to Monica Lewinsky. The allegation appears in a broader legal dispute in California centred on Zabel’s claim that Sánchez copied the idea for her children’s book, The Fly Who Flew to Space. The case remains unresolved, and the allegations described in the complaint have not been proven in court.
According to the Page Six report, which cites Zabel’s lawsuit, Zabel said the nickname emerged after Sánchez met Clinton in 2009 and later expressed a romantic interest in him. The report says Zabel alleged in court papers that, “In communications with Sanchez, Zabel sometimes used the name ‘Monica’ to refer to Sanchez,” and that Sánchez, who was then married to Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell, “seemed to have enjoyed this nickname.” Page Six also reported that Zabel separately told the New York Post, “She said [Clinton] was so sexy and mesmerizing,” adding, “She really wanted to meet him and get an interview … She couldn’t stop talking about Bill Clinton.”
The Clinton element is not the central legal claim in the case, but rather one of several personal anecdotes included in filings connected to a copyright and idea-theft dispute. Federal court records show that the current case, Alanna Zabel et al v. Lauren Sanchez et al, was filed in the Central District of California on 18 June 2025. The docket shows Zabel and her company, AZ I AM Inc., suing Sánchez, Simon & Schuster LLC and The Collective Book Studio LLC. It also shows that the defendants filed a motion to dismiss in August 2025, and that in September 2025 the court took that motion off calendar and indicated it would later reset a hearing date or take the matter under submission.
The dispute itself predates the current federal action. Reporting in September 2024 said Zabel had accused Sánchez of misappropriating a children’s book concept that she said she had originated and discussed with Sánchez in confidence over many years. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that Zabel, a yoga instructor and children’s author, alleged she had given Sánchez private yoga lessons from 2007 to 2010 and that the two had repeatedly discussed co-writing a children’s book through Zabel’s company. The same report said Zabel was seeking compensatory and punitive damages, legal fees and a statement crediting her as the originator of the idea.
Page Six reported in 2024 that Zabel had earlier sent cease-and-desist letters to Sánchez and her publisher after claiming Sánchez’s forthcoming book bore striking similarities to her own title, Dharma Kitty Goes to Mars. That report said Zabel alleged the two had spoken about book ideas over a period of 16 years and that she had hoped Sánchez’s relationship with Jeff Bezos might help support wider charitable distribution of her work. Later federal docket entries show the case evolved into a copyright action, with physical copies of both books manually filed with the court as part of the defendants’ motion to dismiss.
Sánchez’s side has rejected the substance of the claim. Page Six reported that her attorneys described Zabel’s lawsuit as “frivolous” in an August 2025 court filing and argued that the two books were not substantially alike apart from the broad idea that both involved a young character taking an unexpected journey into space. According to the same report, the defence filing said, “The Works are not similar other than the fact that they are both children’s books that involve a spontaneous trip to space,” and argued that allegations about jealousy, resentment and revenge were irrelevant to a copyright analysis.
The book at the centre of the dispute was released in 2024 by The Collective Book Studio and distributed by Simon & Schuster. Publisher listings describe The Fly Who Flew to Space as a 32-page children’s picture book about a fly named Flynn who dreams of becoming an astronaut and ends up on a rocket ship. The publisher and retailer descriptions also identify it as a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Sánchez later announced a follow-up title, suggesting the original book had become an important part of her public identity beyond her television and aviation work.
Sánchez has publicly tied the project to her own experience with dyslexia. In interviews around the book’s release and again in 2026 while promoting a sequel, she said she was not diagnosed until college and had spent years concealing her reading difficulties, including during her time as a television news anchor. People reported in 2024 that she described how her diagnosis changed her life and helped her move from a 2.0 GPA to a 3.8 GPA. More recent coverage of a Today appearance said she again spoke about dyslexia and her wish to encourage children who learn differently. That personal framing has been central to how Sánchez has presented the book in public, even as the lawsuit has cast a shadow over its origins.
Long before the current dispute, Sánchez had built a public career in television and entertainment news. She worked as an anchor and correspondent across local television, Fox Sports and entertainment programming, and served as a reporter for Extra. One archived Extra item from March 2010 confirms that Clinton gave an interview to “Extra’s Lauren Sanchez” following his recent heart procedure, matching the period referenced in the lawsuit anecdote. The interview itself was not framed publicly in romantic terms, but it does establish that Sánchez did in fact interview Clinton during that era.
In the years since, Sánchez’s profile has expanded far beyond television. She is a licensed pilot, the founder of the aerial film company Black Ops Aviation, and in April 2025 flew on Blue Origin’s NS-31 mission, part of the company’s first all-female flight crew since Valentina Tereshkova’s solo mission in 1963, according to Blue Origin and Associated Press reporting. She married Jeff Bezos in June 2025 and has continued to combine media work, philanthropy and publishing. That prominence has ensured that Zabel’s allegations, though untested, have drawn outsized attention because they collide with the carefully built public image Sánchez now projects as an author, pilot and high-profile philanthropist.
For now, the legal case remains active, and the most striking claims in it, including the assertion that Sánchez was nicknamed “Monica” because of comments about Clinton, remain allegations rather than findings of fact. What is clear from the court record is that the dispute has moved beyond celebrity gossip into a formal fight over authorship, intellectual property and reputation, with both sides staking out sharply different versions of how Sánchez’s children’s book came to be.
