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Based on foot traffic data gathered by Bernstein, overall traffic rose 36 percent compared to average traffic level during 2025's two major holiday periods.

Luxury retail remained resilient during China‘s five-day Labor Day holiday — bucking a broader trend of cautious consumer spending — according to foot traffic data gathered by Bernstein across 10 high-end malls in four major cities.

Even though overall traffic dipped 5 percent below Chinese New Year levels in mid-February, Bernstein highlighted strong performance at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton brands, Chanel and an acceleration at Compagnie Financière Richemont’s hard luxury brands based on holiday foot traffic at 10 luxury malls, including K11 and Harbour City in Hong Kong, IFC and Plaza 66 in Shanghai, Guomao, SKP and SKP-S in Beijing, and Taikoo Li, IFS and SKP in Chengdu.

The report noted the proprietary data may only reflect one component of retail store productivity, as metrics such as conversion rate and spending by luxury VICs were not captured by the numbers observed on the ground.

“Overall traffic remains 36 percent higher than the average traffic level observed over 2025’s key holiday periods, including Chinese New Year and National Day holidays in 2025. No data was collected in May 2025, limiting our ability to make direct year-over-year comparisons,” the report added.

In the soft luxury category, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior were the three most popular brands, with Louis Vuitton accruing the most customers at its megastores, according to Bernstein data.

Richemont also enjoyed a holiday spike, with strong footfall at Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels.

“One suspects that the falling gold price, which would leave gold-heavy Chinese competitors in relative disfavor, improving fundamentals, spurred by new local management at Cartier and new collections like the Love Unlimited, and pre-buying in anticipation of rumored end of May price increases could be better explanations,” Bernstein observed.

In stark contrast, traffic growth at Hermès continues to underperform its peers. Bernstein observed that “2026’s creative explosion at Chanel and Dior could come at Hermès’ expense.”

Bernstein also observed positive traffic at Burberry, underperformance at Kering brands and “a significant deceleration” at Miu Miu.

Split by region, Shanghai ranked first in terms of overall store traffic, followed by Hong Kong, Beijing and Chengdu.

Consumer sales during this year’s Labor Day holiday rose 14.3 percent year-over-year, according to Xinhua News, China‘s state-owned news agency.

Overall tourist trips increased 3.4 percent, though spending per trip dipped compared with the same period last year — a sign that overall consumer confidence has yet to fully recover.

Over cold drinks in the Florida heat, this TechCrunch reporter watched from the paddock as founders and investors — the rich and the richer — mingled in search of deals. Conversations barely paused, except for the occasional glance at the track where drivers, sealed inside multi-million-dollar machines, chased the chequered flag.

F1 weekend is a three-day affair, with the race as the finale. In between are kickoffs, soirées, cocktail parties, dinners, and nightclub takeovers — spaces where business and pleasure blur. Events like this, where wealth concentrates, have historically been places where business deals are struck. But the popularity of the F1 paddock has grown in recent years, especially among the startup and venture crowd.

“It’s a hot place for everyone with access trying to strike a deal,” one founder said, recalling being brought to the paddock by a venture firm two years ago.

This year, Chandler Malone, a founder, said he didn’t even attend the race; he only went to some of the side events. So many venture firms were hosting them and much more than usual, he said.

“You name the fund, it was someone there hosting clients,” Marell Evans, an investor, also told TechCrunch. “Lots of folks missed Milken for F1 Miami.”

F1 teams, once sponsored by major oil, tobacco, banks, and alcohol companies, have embraced the new railroad giants. The F1 team liveries this season — plastered with AI, cloud computing, and enterprise company logos — is a literal sign pointing to where the money is.

The past five years reflects the shift. In that time, Oracle became the title sponsor of Red Bull Racing team, the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team struck a multi-year partnership with Microsoft, CoreWeave became Aston Martin Aramco’s official AI cloud partner, Anthropic began working with Williams Racing, Palantir and IBM partnered with Ferrari, AWS began providing data analytics to F1, and the audio app ElevenLabs and fintech Revolut have teamed up with Audi.

Some VC and PE firms also own stakes in F1 teams, including Dorilton Capital’s 2020 acquisition of Williams Racing and the 200 million euro investment into Alpine by backers Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners, and Maximum Effort Investments.

Hannan Happi, founder of the climate startup Exowatt, credits the 2020 Netflix F1 show “Drive to Survive” as a catalyst for increasing audience interest. But the tech industry showing up in force is more recent, Happi said, “really the last three or four years.” He cited all the big tech companies that have moved into the sport, including crypto and AI brands. “Where the sponsors go, the executives will follow,” he said.

It’s no wonder, then, that TechCrunch ran into Lightspeed Ventures CMO Josh Machiz, who explained that founders and execs from many startups in its portfolio were also roaming the paddock. The goal for them, he said, was to strike some enterprise deals with other startups and tech giants.

Though TechCrunch ran into Machiz in the IBM Paddock, he said the firm actually has a structured program in place with Aston Martin to help introduce Lightspeed founders to Aston Martin and its enterprise clients. In the paddock, CIOs and CISOs stand next to CEOs, and rooms are small enough for people to actually chat with each other, Machiz said. Aston Martin, like all the F1 teams, is actively looking for ways to leverage the latest tech, as well as meet the founders behind it.

Technology has always been central to F1, helping drive advancements in consumer tech and car safety. Looking ahead is how teams stay ahead and these days, if a startup like Anthropic gets big enough, the team can nab a future sponsor, too.

Machiz calls Lightspeed the first firm to formalize this kind of partnership and said the Miami race brought in 10 portfolio companies. And it produced results, he said. One of the firm’s blockchain companies struck a handshake deal dover the weekend, and one of its AI infrastructure startups closed two more. Two came from Aston introductions, while the third came by chance, he said.

“The Aston Martin tech team also opened doors to our founders and talked about what they need from builders,” Machiz continued.

Machiz, who used to work at Redpoint, joined Lightspeed just a few months ago. One of the first things he wanted to do was to challenge the idea of the “traditional founder retreat,” where startups and their investors spend time in a remote location, talking, catching up, and, well, sometimes being bored out of their minds.

“The consistent ask from founders was always the same, ‘help me meet more buyers,’” Machiz said, recalling when he used to help plan founder retreats. “Another weekend in Sonoma was never going to do that, and the reviews were always that while [it was] nice to spend time together and to meet tech luminaries or VIP speakers, they’d have rather been building or meeting customers.”

Instead of another retreat, he took the Lightspeed Venture portfolio to F1. It is, after all, he said, “one of the densest concentrations of enterprise buyers anywhere.”

“The opportunity was obvious,” Machiz continued. “We wanted to build a structure around it, not just show up.”

Farooq Malik, founder of the Lightspeed company Rain, said he managed to close a deal, connect with another prospective client, and meet another founder whose product he’s interested in using as part of Rain’s ERP (enterprise resource planning). “This model was a lot more interactive with more organic interactions,” Malik said.

It’s not just startup founders, either. Evans, the investor, said backers are tired of going to dinner and attending conferences. “They want to see real-world experiences, and why not do it at the fastest-growing company in the world right now, F1?,” he mused.

Evans said top money makers like seeing how their business world intertwines with the tech these car teams are using.

“We’ve seen different brands showcase how they’re using AI for the drivers and some of the technology they’re using inside the cars,” he said.

Investor Immpana Srri said she went to Miami this year to look for deals and noted that over the past five years it has become a place for tech people to meet up.

“Sponsors followed, investors followed, and founders followed. Now it’s just where people are,” Srri said.

The race is actually quite fast, she said, and it’s the pre-race and post-race events that matter most over the three-day weekend. Srri flew in by herself, ran into some friends, then got an invite to the McLaren paddock and other brand activations — a micro-conference, she called it — where she met other operators, allocators, and founders.

“It’s all priced as a filter,” she said of how expensive tickets can be. “By the time you’re inside, the room has done the sorting for you. Everyone there has capital, the deal flow, or the kind of track record that justifies dropping six figures on a weekend.”

Like Machiz, she also noted how tiny the spaces are — a pressure cooker of people quietly trying to one-up each other in conversations.

“Deals get showcased; names get dropped. Stuff gets teased. Over the weekend, I heard pitches across defense, CPG, and more,” she said.

Happi, the founder of Exowatt, said F1 champion-turned-investor Nico Rosberg stopped by the startup’s headquarters over the Miami Grand Prix weekend to see what the team was building.

Happi said F1 represents something tech also identifies with: “engineering excellence, rapid iteration, a willingness to spend big to win.”

The aesthetic of the whole sport, he continued, matches the startup world. It’s international by nature, he added, and the fact that the event usually lasts a few days gives people time to close a deal, should they wish.

“F1 is a luxury sport by nature, and that brings a certain type of person,” Happi said, adding that he’s heard of deals getting closed “in the helicopter to the hotel to the track.”

“And it doesn’t hurt that Miami and Las Vegas, suddenly two of the marquee races, are in really fun, entertainment-led cities,” he continued.

Miami kicked off the Lightspeed Aston Martin program, and Machiz hopes to continue throughout the season, at least at the U.S. races, the last of which is Las Vegas in November. Then, he wants to expand his program internationally and is planning to bring a small group of their European founders to England’s Silverstone later this year.

“In AI, distribution is speed,” he said. “The firms that win are the ones that can get founders in front of buyers and into deals faster than anyone else.”

It has been a sad few years for the venerable central processing unit. The one-time standard-bearer of the computing revolution has been pushed aside in recent years with the rise of generative artificial intelligence powered by graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used for a lot more than graphics these days.

But now attention is swinging back to the main brain of data-center computing, the CPU. With one big change: Unlike in the past, Intel

will have to share the spotlight, and may not even be the primary winner.

In the past two weeks, three server CPU companies—Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm Holdings—reported their earnings, and each gave commentary indicating that the market will be larger in a few years than they had previously thought.

“In recent months, we have seen clear signs that the CPU is reasserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in April. “This is not just our wishful thinking, it is what we hear from our customers.”

Arm has projected that the server CPU market will hit $100 billion by 2030, and this week AMD doubled its own estimate to $120 billion. The three companies had $34 billion in combined data-center revenue last year.

That sort of market expansion would be a huge boon to these companies, but to keep it in context, Nvidia is expected to earn more than $150 billion in data-center sales in just the next two quarters.

Before the release of ChatGPT in 2022, servers rarely needed GPUs to do heavy lifting for intense mathematics. Expensive GPU-filled servers were overkill, and data-center customers mostly bought CPU servers to run websites, databases, applications, and other traditional workloads. A typical server configuration contained two Intel server CPUs.

In a 2021 two-way data-center sales race between Intel and Nvidia, Intel held a 70% market share. But the AI revolution changed that dramatically, and by the end of last year Intel only garnered a 7% share.

But four years into the gen AI boom, CPUs are making a comeback. The reason is that AI workloads are beginning to shift from math-intensive training of AI models to the more varied process of running these models, known as inference. The big 2026 inflection is AI agents, software that uses AI models to complete a complex series of tasks from simple conversational prompts. If predictions turn out to be true, in a few years agents will proliferate to the point where they outnumber people on enterprise networks.

Agents chew through inference at a rate that no human could match, and so the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers coming online this year are being built to support that trend. GPUs will still be the primary expense because of AI’s intense math demands.

But agents are software, and software runs on CPUs. If it were five years ago, this would be unquestionably good news for one company: Intel. Indeed, in 2020 and 2021 there was a burst of Covid lockdown-fueled demand for CPU servers and Intel had its best years in the data center, with $26 billion in sales both years.

The data-center CPU market is far more complex now. For starters, server CPUs from Intel’s longtime competitor, AMD, have been gaining in popularity and are considered by many to be better now. At its November investor day, AMD said it had around a 40% market share, and predicted that it will keep rising.

The bigger source of competition may come from chips that are based around the Arm CPU instruction set. An instruction set is the most basic level at which hardware and software communicate. The x86 instruction set that underpins Intel and AMD chips has been dominant in servers, but that’s been changing.

Arm’s first step into x86 server territory was the 2018 launch of the Amazon Web Services Graviton CPU. AWS is the oldest and largest of the clouds, and this set the tone for the industry. Graviton is on its fifth generation now, and for three years running, over half of AWS’s new CPU capacity has been from Graviton. Now the other two big cloud players—Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—also rent out servers with their own custom Arm CPUs. The advantage over x86 servers is Arm’s power efficiency that allows for more computing in the same size data center.

Apple customers have firsthand experience with the efficiency of Arm’s designs, which have been used in MacBook chips since 2020 and easily beat x86 chips in terms of speed and battery life.

This year, Arm changed the game, announcing it would sell a server chip, the AGI CPU, competing with its own licensees for the first time. The company recently predicted that it could see $15 billion in fiscal year 2031 chip sales and this week said near-term demand is twice what it expected.

Another shift toward Arm-based CPUs in the data center comes from the accelerated servers themselves. At first, Nvidia’s AI servers sported Intel CPUs to orchestrate all the mathematics happening in the GPUs. But then in 2023 Nvidia switched over to using its own Arm-based CPUs, and others are now following. Google’s latest TPU-accelerated server will feature its own Axion CPU, and Meta Platforms’ coming custom AI accelerator servers will be run by Arm AGI CPUs. With a nod to the power efficiency of these CPUs, Arm is becoming the choice for this data-center workload.

AMD’s $120 billion prediction should be considered an educated guess, but if the server CPU market expands that quickly, the competition will be fierce and there may not be room for Intel, AMD, and Arm all to win.

MILAN, May 10 (Reuters) - Italian fashion house Giorgio Armani is considering ​selling a 15% stake in three ‌equal parts following the designer's death, potentially bringing in three buyers he had selected as shareholders, a ​newspaper reported on Sunday.

Armani, who died at 91 ​last September, had named French luxury ⁠group LVMH (LVMH.PA), opens new tab and two commercial partners--beauty products ​maker L'Oreal (OREP.PA), opens new tab and EssilorLuxottica (ESLX.PA), opens new tab--as preferred buyers for the ​company.

Based on the founder's will, the sale of an initial 15% stake in the group must take ​place within 12-18 months of his ​death.

Italian daily la Repubblica reported, without citing sources, that ‌Armani ⁠CEO Giuseppe Marsocci is preparing a business plan as he moves to appoint two advisers to oversee the sale.

The advisers would then ​share Marsocci's ​five-year business ⁠plan with potential investors.

Ahead of the formal launch of the process, ​the group was considering splitting the ​15% ⁠stake in three parts, the paper said, adding this would help keep all three ⁠buyers ​engaged in the initial phase.

A representative ​for Armani said the group had no comment on ​the report.

Another week, another infusion of big AI rounds. For this past week, the largest fundraiser by a long shot was Sierra, a developer of AI customer experience tools that picked up $950 million. Other big rounds went to companies in sectors including satellite development, biotech, and, yes, more vertical AI and AI infrastructure.

1. Sierra, $950M, customer experience AI: Sierra, a provider of AI-driven tools for customer experience management, raised $950 million in fresh funding at a $15 billion valuation. Google Ventures and Tiger Global led the financing for the three-year-old, San Francisco-based company.

2. Astranis, $455M, space tech: Astranis, a developer of advanced satellites for high orbits, secured $450 million in equity and debt investment. The financing included a $300 million Series E equity round led by Snowpoint Ventures and Franklin Templeton and up to $155 million in credit through Trinity Capital.

3. Anagram Therapeutics, $250M, biotech: Natick, Massachusetts-based Anagram Therapeutics, a developer of a pill for people living with exocrine pancreatic insufficiency due to cystic fibrosis, pancreatic cancer and related disorders, closed on $250 million in new funding from Blackstone Life Sciences.

4. Blitzy, $200M, AI software development: Blitzy, developer of an autonomous software development platform, picked up $200 million in fresh funding at a $1.4 billion valuation. Northzone led the financing for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company.

5. Corgi Insurance, $160M, insurance: Corgi Insurance, provider of an AI-native insurance platform for startups, secured $160 million in Series B funding. TCV led the financing, which set a $1.3 billion valuation for the San Francisco-based company.

6. Panthalassa, $140M, renewable energy: Portland, Oregon-based Panthalassa, which aims to perform AI inference computing at sea using power generated from ocean waves, raised $140 million in a Series B financing led by Peter Thiel.

7. Reserv, $125M, insurance: Reserv, a provider of third-party administrator services to the insurance industry, closed on $125 million in a Series C funding round led by KKR. Launched in 2022, New York-based Reserv has raised over $200 million in known funding to date, per Crunchbase data.

8. DeepInfra, $107M, AI infrastructure: DeepInfra, a cloud platform for high-throughput AI inference, landed $107 million in Series B funding. Georges Harik and 500 Global led the financing for the four-year-old, Palo Alto, California-based company.

9. Tessera Labs, $60M, vertical AI: San Jose, California-based Tessera Labs, developer of an AI platform for enterprise ERP systems and data, secured $60 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

10. Astrocade, $56M, gaming: Astrocade, developer of an AI platform for creating, building and playing games, announced $56 million in new funding. The funding for the Los Altos, California-based company includes a Series B led by Sequoia Capital and a Series A led by Sea, Astrocade said.

The base, set up for special forces and search-and-rescue teams, was almost discovered early in the conflict

TEL AVIV—Israel set up a clandestine military outpost in the Iraqi desert to support its air campaign against Iran and launched airstrikes against Iraqi troops who almost discovered it early in the war, people familiar with the matter including U.S. officials said.

Israel built the installation, which housed special forces and served as a logistical hub for the Israeli air force, just before the war started with the knowledge of the U.S., the people said.

Search-and-rescue teams were positioned there in case Israeli pilots were downed. None have been. When a U.S. F-15 jet fighter was shot down near Isfahan, Iran, the Israelis offered to help, but U.S. forces managed the rescue of two airmen themselves, one of the people said. Israel did carry out airstrikes to help protect the operation.

The Israeli base was almost discovered in early March. Iraqi state media said a local shepherd reported unusual military activity in the area, including helicopter flights, and the Iraqi military sent troops to investigate. Israel kept them at bay with airstrikes, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

Israel’s military declined to comment. The Iraqi government at the time condemned the attack, which left an Iraqi soldier dead.

“This reckless operation was carried out without coordination or approval,” Lt. Gen. Qais Al-Muhammadawi, deputy commander of the Joint Operations Command, a central security body, told Iraqi state media in comments about the attack in early March.

In a complaint lodged later in March with the United Nations, Iraq said the attack involved foreign forces and airstrikes, attributing it to the U.S. The U.S. wasn’t involved in the attack, the person familiar with the matter said.

The clash was widely reported in Iraqi and Arab media and generated speculation about the identity of the combatants.

After the initial report from the shepherd, Iraqi soldiers set out in Humvees and drove at dawn toward the site. The group came under intense fire, killing one soldier and wounding two others, Muhammadawi said.

Iraqi authorities dispatched two more units from the country’s Counter Terrorism Service, which played an important role in Iraq’s fight with Islamic State, to join a search of the area. It found evidence that military forces had been present in the area.

“It appears there was a certain force on the ground before the strike, supported from the air, operating beyond the capabilities of our units,” Muhammadawi told state media.

An Iraqi government spokesman declined to comment further on the incident or whether it knew of the Israeli base.

The U.S. has carried out multiple strikes in Iraq to protect its own bases and other assets.

Details of the base—and the risks Israel took to establish and protect it—help fill in the picture of how the country managed to fight an air campaign against an enemy around 1,000 miles away.

The base in Iraq allowed Israel to get closer to the battlefield. Israel deployed search-and-rescue teams there so they could respond more quickly if needed for emergency rescue missions, the people familiar with the matter said. Israeli air force special forces, trained to carry out commando operations in enemy territory, were also present on the base, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

Israel’s air force carried out thousands of strikes against targets in Iran during the five-week campaign.

U.S. forces often set up temporary operational sites in the lead up to military operations, security experts say. A makeshift forward-operating base was set up inside Iran and used in the mission to rescue the U.S. airmen whose plane went down in early April.

The U.S. blew up planes and helicopters that got stuck there during the mission.

“It’s normal that before operations you reconnoiter and set up these kinds of locations,” said Michael Knights, the head of research for Horizon Engage, a strategic advisory firm.

The western desert region of Iraq is vast and sparsely populated, making it an ideal location for temporary outposts, Knights said. U.S. Special Forces made use of this area in Iraq as part of operations against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003.

People living in the Iraqi desert have witnessed strange activity over the years, from militant groups like Islamic State to special operations teams, and have learned to stay away, Knights said.

He said locals told him they had spotted unusual helicopter activity there during the current war.

Israeli officials have alluded to covert operations during the war. In early March, the head of the Israeli air force, Tomer Bar, issued a letter to his servicemen.

“These days, fighters from special units of the air force are conducting special missions which could ignite the imagination,” said Bar, who ended his term as air force chief in early May.

Fortress Co-Founder Allegedly Extorted By Sexual Partner

Woman charged for allegedly threatening to share sex videos, photos of Wesley Edens, who also co-owns Milwaukee Bucks

Wesley Edens, the co-founder of Fortress Investment Group and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, answered a LinkedIn message from a China-born entrepreneur in 2022 that blossomed into a correspondence.

Changli “Sophia” Luo was a divorcée living in New York City who had founded One World Initiative Advocacy, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that said it worked to produce video interviews with economists and environmentalists. Edens, a billionaire who had divorced his longtime wife the previous year, built a reputation for making counterintuitive financial bets. He successfully invested in subprime loans after the 2008-09 financial crisis, spent billions to build a private passenger railway in Florida and, in 2018, bought a majority stake in the then-struggling English soccer club Aston Villa.

Over messages, he told her how fun it was to own a sports team. And on their third get-together, Edens and Luo had sex at her apartment in June 2023, according to federal prosecutors.

The brief relationship spiraled into an alleged extortion plot.

Luo, 46, was indicted last year for allegedly trying to shake down Edens for more than $1 billion by threatening to publicize videos and photos of him having sex with her. Her litany of threats continued for months, as Luo reached out to Edens’s family members, told him she would approach investors, and pledged to destroy him, prosecutors said. She was charged with four counts, including blackmail and destruction of records, and has pleaded not guilty. Luo, who was released on a $500,000 bond and placed under home detention, is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

Edens, 64, hasn’t been named publicly as the target of the alleged scheme. After being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman confirmed Edens is the person identified as Victim-1 in legal documents.

The spokesman said Edens had approached law enforcement out of concern for the safety of himself and his family. “Mr. Edens will be making no comment on the case as the indictment speaks for itself with respect to the charges against the defendant,” the spokesman said. “Mr. Edens expects to testify under oath at the upcoming trial.”

Lawyers for Luo have asked the judge to toss the charges, arguing their client was seeking justice and compensation for what they called “an inappropriate and aggressive sexual encounter.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which brought the case, declined to comment.

The case illustrates how executives face both reputational risks and potential harms to their businesses when romantic relationships go awry. It isn’t uncommon for the rich and famous to be targets of extortion demands, but victims are often hesitant to go to law enforcement. And prosecutions typically require not only the cooperation of the extortion victim, but also the public airing of the private matters that led to the conduct in question, particularly if the case goes to trial.

“Extortion victims usually don’t want to cooperate, and don’t want to go to the government—for the very reasons that extortion or blackmail work,” said Scott R. Wilson, a defense attorney who has advised clients grappling with similar matters.

The federal investigation of Luo began in early 2025, after a lawyer representing Edens reached out to leadership at the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, said people familiar with the interaction.

After Luo and Edens had sex, prosecutors said, she sent him a love letter. “I never told you I love you, and tonight I want to tell you that, I have been restraining my feeling for you, as I do love you from the bottom of my heart!” Luo wrote. Edens didn’t respond.

Months later, Luo’s communications turned from flattering to threatening, according to prosecutors. In November 2023, they said, Luo used a fake name to gain access to the doctor’s office where Edens’s then-girlfriend worked. Luo told the woman, who is now Edens’s wife, that she had had sex with Edens, whom she described as a terrible person.

Prosecutors say Luo contacted his ex-wife as well.

Months later, they said, she wrote to Edens alleging that he had sex with her while she was mentally incapacitated. She told him that her “home has cameras,” and that everything Edens “did was caught on camera.” She would go to the media, she said, unless he apologized.

“I am sure your family and business partners will learn about you and your misdeeds from these interviews and will provide exposure that will taint your record forever,” she wrote.

She gave him information for a mediator.

While Edens denied Luo’s allegations, he agreed to participate, believing a resolution would prevent harassment of his family and potential public embarrassment, according to prosecutors.

During a Zoom mediation overseen by a former judge, Luo negotiated with lawyers from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who were representing Edens. Luo’s lawyers said in a court filing that he agreed to settle the matter for $6.5 million, with $1 million upfront.

After that settlement, Luo’s lawyers said she found out she had HPV-16, a sexually transmitted infection that can lead to cancer. She blamed Edens and sought to renegotiate the deal, her lawyers said. Prosecutors said she asked for as much as $1.215 billion.

Luo, who had been representing herself, then hired a lawyer, Tyrone Blackburn. He conveyed her threats, including that she would release compromising photos and would “destroy” Edens if he didn’t take “responsibility,” prosecutors said.

Arthur Aidala, one of Luo’s defense lawyers, said in an April court hearing that his client was being unfairly prosecuted for aggressive posturing made by a former lawyer during settlement talks over the sexual encounter. Aidala said the prior lawyer, Blackburn, had an obligation to warn Luo that the threats they were making in the talks could be considered extortion.

“One of our jobs, your Honor, as you know very well, besides advocating for our clients, is protecting them from themselves,” Aidala told the judge. “They don’t know the rules of the game.”

Blackburn said he never advised Luo to make the threats. “To ever say that I in any way encouraged her to engage in acts of extortion or failed to warn her that her actions and her demands could amount to or be viewed as an act of extortion, that is a baldfaced lie,” he said.

Last May, FBI agents searched Luo’s Manhattan apartment. Prosecutors said they found a phone hidden in a laundry basket and another in a box of sanitary pads. One phone had several pornographic videos and images that had Edens’s face on another man’s body, they said.

On June 14 of last year, federal agents arrested Luo at New York’s JFK airport as she was attempting to board a flight to China, prosecutors said.