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Bill Gates has said he “regrets” ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein, as his former wife Melinda French Gates alluded to “muck” in their marriage, and insisted the Microsoft founder has questions to answer over his relationship with the deceased child sex offender.
Allegations that Gates hid a sexually transmitted disease from his wife after contact with “Russian girls” surfaced in the latest release of the Epstein files, which have provided remarkable insight into the disgraced financier’s multiple celebrity connections and activities.
His office immediately issued a statement denouncing the “absolutely absurd and completely false” assertion, but until now Gates, 70, has remained silent.
He finally spoke Wednesday on the Australian television channel 9News to deny the claim as “false”, and suggested that Epstein was trying to extort or defame him by writing an email in 2013 that further alleged he subsequently tried to give antibiotics to Melinda surreptitiously in case she also became infected.
“Apparently, Jeffrey wrote an email to himself. That email was never sent. The email is false,” Gates said.
“I don’t know what his thinking was there. Was he trying to attack me in some way? Every minute I spent with him, I regret, and I apologize that I did that.”
His interview followed comments made by his ex-wife to NPR on Tuesday, in which she made clear her disapproval of his friendship with Epstein.
“For me, it’s personally hard whenever those details come up, right? Because it brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage,” French Gates told the radio network’s Wild Card podcast.
“Whatever questions remain there of what - I can’t even begin to know all of it - those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, not me.”
The public airing of some of the lowest points in the Gates’s’ 27-year marriage, which ended in a 2021 divorce, epitomizes the fallout still being felt from the Epstein scandal, more than six years after his August 2019 death by suicide in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center as he awaited trial on sexual abuse trafficking charges.
Gates told 9News he met Epstein in 2011 and had dinner with him on several occasions to discuss investing in proposed scientific ventures. He insisted he never went to Epstein’s private Caribbean island, where countless girls and young women are alleged to have been abused, and did not have any relations with any women.
“The focus was always, he knew a lot of very rich people, and he was saying he could get them to give money to global health. In retrospect, that was a dead end,” Gates said.
“I was foolish to spend time with him. I was one of many people who regret ever knowing him. The more that comes out, the more clear it will be that, although the time was a mistake, it has nothing to do with that kind of behaviour.”
The interview with Gates French, meanwhile, will be released in full by NPR on Thursday. The network released snippets, and a three-minute video clip, on Wednesday, in which the 61-year-old spoke of the Epstein files’ release and scrutiny as a “reckoning as a society”.
Talking about Epstein’s numerous victims, she said: “No girl should ever be put in the situation they were put in by Epstein and whatever was going on with all of the various people around him. It’s beyond heartbreaking.
“I remember being those ages the girls were, I remember my daughters being those ages.”
She said she had “moved on” from a marriage she said she had to get away from, and was now “in a really unexpected, beautiful place in my life. I’m so happy to be away from all the muck that was there.”
Asked about her emotions at learning of the claims against her ex-husband, particularly that he tried to secretly procure her antibiotics, she said she felt “just unbelievable sadness”.
She added: “I’m able to take my own sadness and look at those young girls and say, ‘My God, how did that happen to those girls?’ I hope there’s some justice for those now women. What they went through is unimaginable.”
On Wednesday, the Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, said she supported French Gates’s position that her husband had questions to answer, and had written to James Comer, chair of the House oversight committee that is investigating Epstein’s activities.
“Last night, I watched Melinda Gates interview. I immediately asked the chairman of oversight, James Comer, to subpoena, Bill Gates. I have questions for Bill Gates about Epstein,” Mace wrote in a post on X.
On Monday, Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose names also feature in the Epstein files, said they had agreed to testify to the committee, days before the chamber was expected to vote to hold them in contempt for originally refusing to do so.
