Bill Gates has broken his silence after being named in the recently released batch of Epstein Files.
“Apparently, Jeffrey wrote an email to himself. That email was never sent,” Gates, 70, told 9 News Australia on Wednesday, February 4. “The email is false. I don’t know what his thinking was there. Was he trying to attack me in some way?”
Gates added, “Every minute I spent with him, I regret, and I apologize that I did that.”
Gates was responding to a claim made by late billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in a series of documents released by the United States Department of Justice on Friday, January 30. Epstein alleged in an unsent email that Gates had sexual relations with two “Russian girls” and got a sexually transmitted infection.
“I never went to the island, I never met any women,” Gates stated on Wednesday. “And so, the more that comes out, the more clear it’ll be that, although the time was a mistake, it had nothing to do with that kind of behavior.”
Epstein’s alleged email also claimed that Gates needed antibiotics for the apparent STI, which he unknowingly gave to then-wife Melinda French Gates. (Epstein died by suicide at age 66 in 2019 while in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.)
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Gates told the news outlet on Wednesday that he met Epstein in 2011 and they “only went to dinners” until 2014. Their relationship was purely business related, Gates claimed.
“The focus was always, he knew a lot of very rich people, and he was saying he could get them to give money to global health. In retrospect, that was a dead end,” he said. “I was foolish to spend time with him. I was one of many people who regret ever knowing him.”
Gates’ interview on Wednesday echoes a statement released by the tech giant’s spokesperson after the Epstein files went public.
“These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false,” the spokesperson shared in a statement to CBS News. “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.”
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Gates’ ex-wife also weighed in on the recent claims.
“I think we’re having a reckoning as a society. 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,” French Gates, 61, said in a clip from NPR’s “Wild Card with Rachel Martin” podcast, released on Tuesday, February 3. “It’s beyond heartbreaking.”
French Gates noted that the allegations bring back “very very painful times” in her marriage. (Gates was married to French Gates for 27 years before they announced their split in May 2021.
“I have moved on from that,” she continued. “I purposely pushed it away and I moved on. I’m in a really unexpected, beautiful place in my life.”
French Gates added, “Those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband. They need the answer to those things, not me. I am so happy to be away from all the muck.”
