Bill Gates’s ties with ‘evil’ paedophile contributed to divorce: Ex-wife Melinda
Melinda French Gates has said her former husband Bill Gates’s relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffery Epstein contributed to their split.
In her first interview since her divorce from the Microsoft founder last year, Melinda told CBS Mornings that Bill continued to meet with the disgraced financier despite her having “nightmares” about him.
Melinda told the programme that she insisted on meeting Epstein back in 2011 because she wanted to see “who this man was”.
“I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. I made that clear to him. I also met Jeffrey Epstein exactly one time. I wanted to see who this man was and I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door,” she told journalist Gayle King.
“He was abhorrent, evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards. That’s why my heart breaks for these young women. That’s how I felt, and I am an older woman. He was awful.”
She said Bill had to answer the many times he met Epstein. “It was not one thing, it was many things [that led to the divorce]. Any of the questions remaining about what Bill’s relationship with him was… those are for Bill to answer. I made it very clear how I felt about him,” she said.
Bill has said in the past that meeting with Epstein multiple times was a “huge” mistake. In a statement to CBS, he said: “Meeting with Epstein was a mistake that I regret deeply. It was a substantial error in judgement.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Melinda also suggested Bill had more than one affair throughout their 27-year-marriage. “Those are questions Bill needs to answer,” she said when asked about reports he cheated multiple times. The billionaire-philanthropist has previously acknowledged one affair.
“I believe in forgiveness. I thought we had worked through some of that,” Melinda said of his 2000 affair with a Microsoft employee. “I gave every single piece of myself to this marriage. I was committed from the day we got engaged to the day I got out of it.”
Melinda and Bill announced in May 2021 that they were ending their 27-year marriage.
The pair’s divorce was finalised privately in Washington – where their nonprofit Gates Foundation is based – in August.
The terms of it were never made public but Bill was worth around $152 billion at the time, giving Melinda a 50 per cent settlement of $76 billion. That does not include the couple’s vast property portfolio.
Financier Epstein committed suicide in his New York jail cell in August 2019. He had a decades-long association with the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell , leading to her 2021 conviction on US federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy for helping him procure girls, including a 14-year-old, for child sexual abuse and prostitution.
