Billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates has said her ex-husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, being named in new files relating to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein dredged up “painful times in my marriage”.
She told an NPR podcast she feels “unbelievable sadness” about the Epstein allegations and that the people named in the records, including her former husband, need to answer to it.
“I am so happy to be away from all the muck,” she said. The couple divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage.
Records released by the US justice department include an allegation by Epstein that Bill Gates caught a sexually transmitted disease. He has called the claim “absolutely absurd”.
The way she repeatedly emphasizes how far away she is from all of this makes me wonder how true that really is.
Yeah, I clocked that too. I think it’s deliberate, but more for legal reasons. She’s probably terrified Bill is going to get sued by some trafficking survivor, hence the emphasis on “ex-husband,” and “he needs to answer those questions,” etc.
I say that because she separated from him as soon as the Epstein thing really started to register publicly, and implicit accusations of adultery were already a thing with him. To her credit she’s never been credibly linked to Epstein, or to put it another way, her repulsion always read as real to me. But who knows. They’re all doing the darvo so it’s hard to tell.