Bill Gates on Tuesday apologized to staff of the Gates Foundation for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, saying his ties to the notorious sex offender endangered the Seattle-based foundation, according to a recording of an internal town hall meeting viewed by The Seattle Times.
The Microsoft co-founder, who formed the foundation in 2000 with his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, addressed his yearslong connection with Epstein after records of their interactions surfaced in a massive trove of documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Gates acknowledged that he first met with Epstein in 2011, three years after the New York financier was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he continued to spend time with Epstein through 2014. Gates also acknowledged that he had two affairs, one with a Russian bridge player and one with a Russian nuclear physicist, that he said Epstein tried to use as leverage over Gates.
Epstein, a registered sex offender from his 2008 conviction, was accused of rape and operating a sex trafficking ring involving young women and girls. In interviews with investigators, lawsuits and public statements, his accusers describe being sexually exploited at Epstein’s island in the Caribbean and his ranch in New Mexico.
The release of 3 million pages of Epstein files revealed Epstein’s connections with wealthy and powerful people, and have since led to the arrest of the former Prince Andrew in the United Kingdom and a rash of high-profile resignations around the world.
Gates met with Epstein three times in 2011 and talked about “global health and the desire to raise more money,” he said during Tuesday’s town hall meeting in Seattle, in an hourlong discussion first publicized by The Wall Street Journal.
Epstein described one of those meetings in an email to British politician Peter Mandelson, writing that he was having “monstrous fun” with Gates in Seattle. There were other meetings in 2012, 2013 and 2014 about a potential fund dedicated to global health, for which Epstein said he could raise $100 billion thanks to his relationship with Wall Street billionaires, according to Gates.
They met in Gates’ private office on the Eastside and in New York. They spent time together in France and saw each other briefly in Vancouver, B.C. Gates said he never went to Epstein’s private Caribbean island or his New Mexico ranch.
By 2014, Gates said at the town hall, it was clear the fund wasn’t going to materialize, and he stopped emailing Epstein. He doesn’t appear to have responded to at least a dozen messages Epstein sent to him in subsequent years, according to Justice Department records.
“I made a huge mistake. … Our reputation is on the line and what was the upside? In retrospect, nothing,” Gates told employees.
He also referred to the “horrific email” that Epstein appeared to have written to himself, in which Epstein wrote that he had been caught up in a marital dispute between Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates and was “helping Bill to get drugs, in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls, to facilitating his illicit trysts, with married women.”
Gates said that “most of that email is not true,” aside from the fact that he did have affairs with Russian women.
