Melinda Gates was agitated and uneasy after her and Bill Gates’ meeting with Jeffrey Epstein, according to The Daily Beast.
In 2013, during a meeting between Bill and Melinda Gates and Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda Gates expressed dissatisfaction with her husband’s relationship with the financier, The Daily Beast reported Thursday.
With the Gateses’ separation, sources told the outlet that Bill Gates’ relationship with Epstein — who had already pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in 2008 when the two met in 2011 — “still haunts” Melinda Gates.
According to the outlet, the couple met Epstein in September 2013 in New York City at his Upper East Side mansion. According to sources speaking to The Daily Beast, Melinda Gates told friends shortly after the meeting about her distress during the encounter. According to many sources close to the couple, she was “enraged” about her husband’s relationship with Epstein.
The New York Times first reported on Gates’ links to Epstein in late 2019, following Epstein’s suicide in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where he was awaiting trial on new sex-trafficking charges against him.
Gates was one of the high-profile celebrities who faced criticism following Epstein’s July 2019 detention, but Gates was unique among the billionaires, lawmakers, and royals who parlayed with Epstein in that he started his friendship with the financier after Epstein was already convicted of sex crimes, according to The Times.
According to The Times, Gates and Epstein met several times between 2011 and 2013. The outlet confirmed that Gates flew on Epstein’s private jet from New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, despite the fact that Gates previously denied traveling with Epstein in a 2019 Wall Street Journal interview.
“I had no company or personal relationship with him,” Gates told The Journal. “I did not travel to New Mexico, Florida, or Palm Beach. There were people nearby who said, “Hey, if you want to raise money for global health and increase philanthropy, he knows a lot of wealthy people.” Every meeting I had with him was with men. I was never invited to any parties or events of that kind. He has never contributed money to something that I am aware of.”
According to The Beast, the two men’s relationship began to deteriorate in the fall of 2014, following Gates’ $2 million donation to MIT’s Media Lab, which the lab’s former director said was facilitated by Epstein. (A Gates representative told The Journal that this assertion is false: “While Epstein approached Bill Gates vigorously, there is no evidence of a business arrangement or personal relationship between the two. And any assertion that Epstein guided Bill Gates’ programmatic or personal grantmaking is patently false “‘)
According to The Times, Epstein complained to an associate shortly afterwards that Gates had ceased communicating with him.
The Gateses declared their separation this week, ending their 27-year marriage.
“After much consideration and work on our relationship, we have decided to dissolve our marriage,” the couple said in a statement on Twitter on Monday. “We have raised three extraordinary children and established a foundation that works to ensure that all people can live safe, prosperous lives.”
The couple is said to have divorced prior to the announcement, and according to TMZ, Melinda Gates described the marriage as “irretrievably broken.”
According to The Daily Beast, financial and public-relations experts had been working on the details of the duo’s breakup “for weeks” prior to the announcement.
The couple married in 1994 and are the parents of three children. Additionally, they co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The couple’s representative did not immediately respond to an Insider request for comment.
