Bill Gates’ ex-wife says she felt “unbelievable sadness” about allegations in the Epstein files that her former husband plotted to slip her antibiotics for a sexually transmitted infection he contracted following “sex with Russian girls.”
Gates, 70, has vehemently denied that there is any truth to claims made in a 2013 email Jeffery Epstein drafted.
The draft email claimed the Microsoft co-founder had “begged” to erase messages about an alleged sexually transmitted disease, a request for antibiotics he could secretly give Melinda French Gates, and a graphic description of his penis.
French Gates, 61, spoke to NPR host Rachel Martin during an episode of her podcast Wild Card, which will broadcast in full later this week. Asked how it felt to see coverage of the files, French Gates said in a candid interview that her dominant emotion was “sad, just unbelievable sadness.”
She explained that the details were “personally hard” because they “bring back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage,” adding, “I left my marriage, I had to leave my marriage, I wanted to leave my marriage.”
French Gates and Gates divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage. Gates has previously acknowledged that his meetings with Epstein were “a huge mistake.”
In a 2022 interview, she said: “I did not like that he [Bill Gates] had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein… I made that clear to him.” She also described the only time she’d met Epstein, saying: “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards.”
Having previously admitted that her ex-husband’s ties to Epstein were one factor in her decision to leave, she told Martin that she is “so happy to be away from all the muck.”
She also stressed that questions about the files “are for those people and for even my ex-husband, they need to answer to those things, not me.”
Turning to the survivors, French Gates said, “No girl should ever be put in the situation that they were put in by Epstein and whatever was going on with all of the various people around him,” calling the alleged abuse “beyond heartbreaking.”
She said she now looks at “those young girls” featured in the documents and hopes “there’s some justice” for those women who have testified in Washington. “At least... I’ve been able to move on in life. What they went through is just unimaginable,” she added.
The Department of Justice has released more than three million pages of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, including two 2013 draft emails Epstein wrote to himself.
In those drafts, Epstein claimed that Bill Gates had contracted a sexually transmitted disease after encounters with “Russian girls” and allegedly sought antibiotics to “surreptitiously” give to his wife without her knowledge. The documents also assert that an associate helped arrange “illicit trysts” with “Russian girls” and “married women.”
The emails appear to be drafts written by Epstein on behalf of Nikolic, a former science adviser to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It appears as though Epstein was trying to get Nikolic to make the explosive claims to Gates, but there is no evidence that Nikolic actually sent them or endorsed the claims.
A spokesperson for Bill Gates said: “These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false. The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”
NPR’s full Wild Card interview with French Gates is due to be released on Thursday.
The Daily Beast has contacted The Gates Foundation for comment.
