On Tuesday, Bill Gates reportedly admitted to staffers at the Gates Foundation that he had affairs with two Russian women during his marriage to Melinda French Gates.
The confession, per The Wall Street Journal, happened during a town hall meeting Gates held to apologize (again) for his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire sex trafficker who died in 2019. Gates has openly discussed becoming friends with Epstein in 2011, three years after the disgraced financier had been convicted for solicitation of a minor in 2008. They had a brief friendship, which Gates later described as stemming from their shared interest in “global health philanthropy,” though “in retrospect, I was foolish to spend any time with him.”
In the town-hall meeting, a recording of which was obtained by WSJ, Gates denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes — as he’s done in past statements about their friendship — saying he never “did anything illicit” or “saw anything illicit.” “To be clear, I never spent any time with victims, the women around him,” he reportedly told his staffers, conceding that he frequently flew in Epstein’s private plane and traveled the world with him and often sat in meetings with the financier and other powerful men.
Gates apparently also shared with employees that, while he was vaguely aware there were some limitations on Epstein’s travel, he did not know the details nor the full extent of his criminal past and that he ignored his then-wife, Melinda, when she raised red flags about associating with Epstein as early as 2013. “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing,” he said.
Gates also confirmed rumors of extramarital affairs that seem to have been referenced in the DoJ’s latest release of Epstein files. In 2013 emails Epstein appeared to have written to himself, styled as a resignation letter from Gates’s then–science adviser Boris Nikolić, Epstein claimed Nikolić had facilitated “illicit trysts” between Gates and other women and that Nikolić had helped him obtain drugs “in order to deal with the consequences of sex with Russian girls.” (Nikolić has denied knowledge of the email or granting Epstein permission to write it.)
In the town-hall meeting, Gates seemingly addressed the email, sharing that he “did have affairs, one with a Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities.” He also said that his former science adviser, who was friendly with both Gates and Epstein, had told Epstein about the affairs, which Epstein subsequently used as leverage while helping the adviser negotiate his departure from Gates’s employment, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Gates added that he cut off contact with Epstein in 2014 but reiterated his claim that Epstein continued to reach out to him in the following years. “I apologize to other people who are drawn into this because of the mistake that I made,” he said.
Bill and Melinda divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage. In interviews, Melinda has implied that her ex-husband’s relationship with Epstein played a role in the decision to end the marriage. “It’s not one thing; it was many things,” she told Gayle King in 2022. “But I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no.”