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When Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates announced that they were getting a divorce five years ago, Bill still had a decent reputation, for a billionaire. I remember coming away from the initial coverage of the news with the impression that there was no obvious bad actor in their story, and maybe they were splitting up for normal, mundane reasons—normal and mundane for billionaires, anyway.
Cut to this week, and this headline, from the New York Post: “Bill Gates Confesses to Cheating on Ex-Wife Melinda With 2 Women During Their 27-Year Marriage.” Welp, so much for a villainless divorce. And what’s more, Gates only confessed to these affairs in the course of defending himself from even worse accusations stemming from his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose emails have been a source of endless controversy over the last several years.
Gates didn’t intend to admit his affairs to the whole world, in all likelihood—the Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of him addressing the staff at the Gates Foundation, the charitable organization with an $86 billion endowment that he founded with his former wife in 2000. Gates’ association with Epstein has been known (and heavily criticized) for years, but it’s been drawing renewed scrutiny thanks to the Department of Justice’s latest batch of files, which it made public late last month. The documents that have attracted the most attention recently were emails, apparently written by Epstein and sent to himself, that suggested Epstein had facilitated extramarital trysts for Gates and helped get him drugs “in order to deal with consequences of sex with russian girls,” among other indiscretions.
It can be a little confusing to parse exactly what Gates is admitting and what he’s denying in the meeting. “I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” he reportedly said in the staff meeting. But, uh, since when are affairs not illicit? I think what he means is that he did nothing criminal, and nothing involving the women Epstein was accused of preying on. According to Gates, it was all business meetings, basically, and there was no facilitating of trysts.
I was particularly fascinated by what Gates said about his infidelities: “I did have affairs, one with a Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events, and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities.” I’m not sure what to make of both of the women he had affairs with being Russian, and I even more don’t know what to make of them being a bridge player and a nuclear physicist. They’re such oddly specific professions, like they came out of some kind of Richard Scarry book of mistresses. I also can’t help but dwell on the phrasing: “bridge player who met me at bridge events” is very telling, because it doesn’t say that they initially met a bridge event but that they met (regularly?) at bridge events—he’s more or less saying he had sex appointments at bridge events. And then the nuclear physicist that he met through “business activities,” a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one—obviously I am picturing Denise Richards as “Christmas Jones” in that one James Bond movie.
Do we believe Gates that he is a bad guy at a cheats-on-his-wife level but not a goes-to-Epstein’s-sex-parties level? I really couldn’t say. But I did find one slightly admirable thing about Gates in this whole sordid mess: I like that he mentioned that his ex had longtime reservations about Epstein. “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing,” he reportedly said at the meeting. He’s right—she deserves credit for that! If it’s true that his relationship with Epstein was one of the main reasons she left him, she deserves credit for that, too. This reminds me that Gates once called divorcing Melinda the biggest regret of his life. Good. As he should. Despite Gates’ current reputational crisis, he’s still a billionaire with a lot of influence, and we’re probably stuck with him. If we have to have disgraced billionaires, I guess I’ll take the one who expresses regret over his mistakes and says nice things about his ex-wife over the one who destroys newspapers and the one who did a Nazi salute.
