Bill Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, issued a strongly worded denial Friday on the latest allegations to emerge about his relationship with disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The Department of Justice, as part of more than 3 million pages of documents related to Epstein, released on Friday, unsealed 2013 emails written by Epstein and sent to himself.
They appear to be notes he was drafting for a person named Boris, who worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to send to Bill Gates after a dispute.
One of the emails, with the subject line “bill,” suggests that Bill Gates had requested antibiotics for a sexually transmitted disease to “surreptitiously” give to his now ex-wife, Melinda French Gates. Another email said Boris had helped Bill Gates “get drugs,” and helped facilitate “illicit trysts” between the billionaire Microsoft founder and “Russian girls” as well as “married women.”
The emails contain no corroboration of the claims.
“These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false,” a spokesperson for Bill Gates told Business Insider in a statement. “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.”
It’s not known if the text of the emails was ever sent to Gates — the founder of Microsoft, a global philanthropist, and once the richest man in the world. Since Epstein’s 2019 suicide at a federal jail, Gates has faced questions about the extent of their relationship.
In the past, Gates has said that he attended several dinners with Epstein for philanthropic reasons and that he now regrets having spent time with him.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Melinda Gates began seeking divorce counsel in 2019, around the time news of Bill’s meetings with Epstein surfaced publicly. She told CBS in 2022 that her ex-husband’s ties to Epstein were a factor in their split.
