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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is downplaying his relationship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that they were simply dinner buddies.
During an interview on Australia’s ABC 7.30, host Sarah Ferguson said to Gates that “one of the issues that dogged” his relationship with ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, was his longstanding and controversial ties to Epstein.
“Do you regret the relationship that you maintained with him against Melinda’s advice and wishes?” Ferguson asked Gates.
“I will say for the over a 100th time, yeah, I shouldn’t have had dinners with him,” Gates said while shrugging his shoulders.
Ferguson didn’t stop there and informed Gates that “Epstein had a way of sexually compromising” people.
“Is that what Melinda was warning you about?” Ferguson asked.
“No, I mean, no, I had dinner with him and that’s all,” Gates said.
“That I had dinner with him,” Gates said when asked if he had “any regrets.”
Gates then rejected that his foundation had any connection to Epstein.
“There never was any relationship of any kind,” Gates said.
Melinda opened up about her divorce from Bill Gates last year, saying the pandemic played a role and gave her the opportunity to get out of the marriage.
“I had some reasons I just couldn’t stay in that marriage anymore,” she said in an interview. “But the odd thing about COVID is that it gave me the privacy to do what I needed to do. It’s unbelievably painful, in innumerable ways, but I had the privacy to get through it.”
“I kept working with the person I was moving away from, and I needed to show up and be my best self every single day,” she said. “So even though I might be crying at 9 a.m. and then have to be on a video conference at 10 a.m. with the person I’m leaving, I have to show up and be my best. I learned as a leader that I could do it. It reminded me that the foundation calls me to be my best.”
“We work with unbelievable partners around the world who were also struggling during COVID,” she said. “I was on a video call with a woman who had lost her father, and a week later she’s on a call with me, right?”
In an interview this year, Melinda mentioned that her husband’s relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein played a role.
In a tell-all interview with CBS host Gayle King, the 57-year-old spoke about infidelity and more, The Daily Beast reported. But one thing that stuck out more than the others is the role that the late convicted sex offender Epstein played in her wanting a divorce.
Melinda Gates acknowledged in an interview that her divorce from Bill Gates came about in part because of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein: “It was many things. But I did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. I made that clear to him." https://t.co/Kp34SSpQHm
— Vicky Ward (@VickyPJWard) March 3, 2022
“It was many things. But I did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein,” she told King. “I made that clear to him.”
She said that she met Epstein “exactly one time because I wanted to see who this man was. And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterward. So my heart breaks for these young women.”
Melinda went on to talk about her marriage to Bill Gates and many of the troubles the couple had.
“On the day I got married, I never thought I would end up being divorced,” she said to King.
Her husband had admitted to having one affair during their marriage, but she would not confirm there were any more, saying only “those are questions Bill needs to answer.”
“I thought we had worked through some of that,” she said. “There just came a point in time where there was enough there that I realized it just wasn’t healthy. And I couldn’t trust what we had.”
“I had a lot of tears for many days. I mean, days where I’m literally laying on the floor … thinking, ‘How can this be? How can I get up? How am I going to move forward?’” she added in a clip of the interview.
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