Melinda Gates warned her husband, Bill Gates, not to do with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein after a previously undisclosed meeting. Bill and Melinda Gates had a previously unknown meeting with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in New York City — and the visit was so uncomfortable Melinda Gates warned her husband not to have anything to do with the financier again, according to the New York Post. The Microsoft co-founder and his wife — who announced their divorce this week — visited.
According to the Daily Beast, Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse in September 2013, citing sources who said Melinda was “furious” after the meeting. The meeting came on the same day the philanthropic couple accepted the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award at the Pierre Hotel. According to the outlet, it was photographed with the then-Mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg. Friends of the couple told the Daily Beast that Melinda is still haunted by the encounter with Epstein, who had been accused of years of molesting underage girls and killed himself in 2019 while locked up in Manhattan on sex-trafficking charges. But it is unclear whether Melinda was appalled by Epstein’s prior conviction or didn’t like his personality.
“He just was an obnoxious guy. He almost made a point of having bad manners, not paying attention at dinner,” a person told the Daily Beast. “I could see how anybody, even without suspicions, would not want to be around him.” The outlet reported that ties between Gates and Epstein were allegedly much deeper than the tech titan had admitted — and cited a New York Times report that said the two men met several times beginning in 2011, three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in Florida.
Two Gates associates acted as intermediaries between the two, according to the Times, which identified them as biotech investor Boris Nikolic, a former Gates Adviser who was named as a backup executor in Epstein’s last will, and Melanie Walker, who worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and served as Epstein’s Science Adviser. A person close to Walker told the Daily Beast she did not attend the meeting or help set up any discussions between the two men. Nikolic did not return the outlet’s requests for comment.
A rep for Bill and Melinda Gates also did not respond to requests for comment by the Daily Beast.
Two prominent researchers are quitting MIT’s Media Lab over revelations that the famed technology research hub and its director took money from Jeffrey Epstein after he’d served time for sex offenses involving girls and young women. According to the Times, Gates had met with Epstein in 2011 at his Manhattan home, with the disgraced financier’s former girlfriend Eva Andersson-Dubin and her daughter in attendance.
According to the Times, gates visited Epstein several times from 2011 to 2013, reporting that Epstein had tried pitching a new charitable fund to JPMorgan and the Gates Foundation.
In 2013, the Microsoft multibillionaire also flew on Epstein’s so-called “Lolita Express” private jet from New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, according to flight records reviewed by the Times. “I met him. According to the Daily Beast, I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him,” Gates said in September 2019.
“I didn’t go to New Mexico, Florida, Palm Beach, or any of that. Every meeting where I was with him was meeting with men. I was never at any parties or anything like that. people around him were saying, ‘Hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people,’” he said. He never donated any money to anything I know about,” Gates added.
A Gates spokeswoman told the Times that he was unaware Epstein owned the plane.
A technology associate who has attended the same events as Epstein expressed surprise that Gates had considered cultivating philanthropic connections with the late pedophile.
“I can’t claim that so many are claiming,” the person told the Daily Beast, referring to people in Epstein’s orbit who’ve claimed to have had no suspicions of Epstein’s abuse.
“If you ask Bill Gates, he’ll say, ‘Oh, I had no idea he wasn’t up to anything of the highest moral character.’ But I seriously doubted Epstein’s moral character,” the source told the outlet on condition of anonymity. “The people around him,” the source added, referring to Epstein, “had a varying spectrum of what they knew and didn’t know and how they rationalized it.” The person said, “Many people were uncomfortable with Epstein, completely independent of his” sexual misconduct.
