According to a report from The New York Times, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates testified behind closed doors before the U.S. House Oversight Committee on June 10. During the hearing, Gates argued that after he began cutting ties with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein used information about Gates’s extramarital affair to blackmail him into reconnecting.
In this closed-door hearing, the House Oversight Committee questioned Gates about the details of his interactions with Epstein.
Gates reiterated what he’s always said—that he deeply regrets any association with Epstein, but never witnessed Epstein committing any “criminal acts,” and emphasized that he “never hurt anyone.”
Shortly after Epstein was arrested by federal authorities in 2019 for a series of sex crimes, the inside story of his ties with Gates began to surface. These revelations severely damaged Gates’s personal reputation and accelerated the breakdown of his marriage. This year, his charitable foundation commissioned a third party to fully review the relationship between Gates and Epstein.
In his statement, Gates said: “My philanthropic work relies on building a network of trust through reputation to save lives. Meeting with Epstein was a serious misjudgment that nearly derailed all my charitable efforts. What he did runs completely counter to everything I’ve worked for my entire life. I’ve always wanted to create a world where everyone can live healthy and fulfilling lives.”
Gates’s connection with Epstein began in 2011, when Epstein had already pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from underage girls. He struck a controversial non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors, which ended investigations into multiple charges, including that Epstein had sexually abused dozens of underage girls over many years—some victims as young as 14.
A photo of Gates with a young woman appears in documents previously released by the House Oversight Committee. (Source: Financial Times)
Gates said that when he was introduced to Epstein in 2011, he should have thoroughly checked out Epstein’s background beforehand.
“I had a vague idea that Epstein had some legal trouble, but I didn’t fully grasp the severity of his crimes. I didn’t vet him with the due diligence I should have before accepting that meeting introduction,” Gates said.
Before 2014, Gates met with Epstein several times, mainly to discuss setting up a charitable fund that would offer tax benefits to related parties. Epstein also discussed the fund with JPMorgan Chase executives and hoped to earn a service fee from it. But the fund never materialized, and their communication on the matter largely ended by late 2014.
Gates claimed that after he voluntarily cut ties with Epstein, he learned that the scandal-ridden financier had been gathering leverage from Gates’s marital troubles to manipulate and blackmail him.
“Today, public court documents make it clear that Epstein was using information about my marital infidelity to blackmail me,” Gates stated in his testimony.
At a Gates Foundation employee meeting earlier this year, Gates admitted to having two extramarital affairs with two Russian women, which Epstein later discovered. However, Gates said those affairs had nothing to do with Epstein’s victims.
At the time, Gates told employees: “I didn’t do anything illegal, and I didn’t witness anything illegal.”
Gates and his ex-wife Melinda divorced in 2021. In February, she told the media that the developments in the Epstein case reminded her of “some very, very painful moments in the marriage.”
“The questions I don’t know about, or can’t fully understand, should be answered by those people, including my ex-husband,” she said in an interview. “They need to take responsibility for these things, not me.”
“For me, every time these details come up, it feels really tough, right?” she told NPR. “It reminds me of some very, very painful times in my marriage, but I’ve moved on. I’ve deliberately left all that behind and moved forward. My life now is in an unexpectedly wonderful place.”
Besides Gates, the House Oversight Committee has recently interviewed several key figures in Epstein’s circle, including former U.S. President Bill Clinton and retail magnate Leslie Wexner.
The committee also scheduled two interviews: one with Wall Street executive James Staley, who long handled Epstein’s business at JPMorgan Chase, and another with private equity tycoon Leon Black, who paid Epstein $170 million to handle his tax and estate planning matters.
