Lauren Sánchez knows what you’re thinking about her.
On Wednesday, Sánchez, 54, appeared at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit 2024 to speak to Moira Forbes about her children’s book and her philanthropic work with her fiancé, Jeff Bezos.
But Sánchez also used the summit to address the fact that many people only associate her with Bezos.
“I’m in this room with all these influential and powerful women,” she said. “I’m looking around and going, ‘Whoa,’ and it doesn’t escape me that most of you know me as Lauren Sánchez comma Jeff Bezos’ fiancée.”
“I get it, but I can choose to do something, or I can choose to do nothing,” Sánchez said. “And I’m choosing to do something.”
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Sánchez and Bezos have been a public couple since January 2019, as their relationship was revealed the same day Bezos announced his divorce from MacKenzie Scott. Sánchez and Bezos got engaged in May 2023.
In her conversation with Forbes, Sánchez said she tries to use the platform her relationship has given her to spotlight others’ experiences.
“In my life as a journalist, I was able to amplify incredible people’s stories and what I call illuminate them,” she said. “Now I get to do it in a different way, and I really take it like this responsibility I hold in high regard.”
Before her relationship with Bezos, Sánchez, a mother of three, was an Emmy-winning broadcast journalist and a pilot.
Now, she works with Bezos on philanthropic endeavors like the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion effort to fight the climate crisis, and she published her first children’s book on Tuesday.
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Though they spend much of their working — and leisure — hours together, Sánchez told Forbes that Bezos supports her to take on her own projects.
“Jeff really puts me out there, and he goes, ‘Go out there. Do your thing,'” she said. “He encourages me, and I’m lucky to have a partner like that.”
And she said that support goes both ways.
“Jeff does need all the support, and I encourage him just like he encourages me,” she said. “A lot of people say this about Jeff like, ‘Oh, he’s changed.’ He hasn’t changed. He’s just being revealed more and more every day.”
