These people added that the source was compensated by The Enquirer. How much? An amount well above the $150,000 that the tabloid paid the former Playboy model Karen McDougal to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election, they said.

Mr. Bezos changes Hollywood — and vice versa

For years, Mr. Bezos did not seem like the kind of chief executive who craved rock-star status. He didn’t employ a personal publicist to help bolster the Bezos myth, because he didn’t need to. The sheer reach of his company did the mythmaking for him: Amazon has transformed the way we read, shop and watch TV, and through its cloud services division runs an astonishingly large portion of the internet. Even as the company’s power grew, Mr. Bezos made a point of directing focus to the customer, who he said occupied “the empty chair” in every meeting.

Mr. Bezos bought a home in Beverly Hills in 2007, as Amazon was beginning to expand into entertainment. The company does not break out the financials of its Hollywood business, but it has been spending furiously to build a TV and film portfolio that enriches its Prime offering. Subscription services brought in more than $14 billion last year. To Hollywood insiders, the gusher of cash turned Mr. Bezos into the object of fascination and fear.

As Amazon bulldozed its way into the industry, Mr. Bezos transformed from a low-key, geeky Seattle dad to a chiseled presence on the red carpet. He has never seemed to be enthralled with the filmmaking process — he leaves day-to-day management to the Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke — but like Howard Hughes and other outsider tycoons before him, Mr. Bezos has unmistakably embraced the industry’s trappings.

His true Hollywood coming out was in 2016, when he gave a party — lavish even in the context of awards season — to celebrate the Oscar favorite “Manchester by the Sea,” an Amazon Studios production. Matt Damon was the co-host. It was held in a temporary edifice (only in Beverly Hills could it be called a “tent”) perched at the end of the long, pebbled driveway at Mr. Bezos’s mansion, high above Sunset Boulevard. The evening appears to be the first time that he and Ms. Sanchez were publicly photographed together.

They had met the previous year. As Amazon pushed into entertainment, it often worked with Endeavor, and Mr. Whitesell and Ms. Sanchez started socializing with the Bezoses. Their children played together at the Bezos family’s 29,000-square-foot compound outside Seattle, sprinting around a room decorated with NASA memorabilia and a chair in which J.K. Rowling wrote parts of the “Harry Potter” books. (It sold at auction for $394,000.)