Jeffrey Epstein Tried to Blackmail Bill Gates, Microsoft Co-Founder Says

Microsoft founder Bill Gates in London on Feb. 15, 2023. (Justin Tallis/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein attempted to blackmail Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest men in the world, the co-founder of Microsoft has said through a spokesperson.

“Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” a spokeswoman for Gates told The Wall Street Journal.

Gates has acknowledged meeting with Epstein, who pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida in 2008 and was accused of trafficking young girls, multiple times.

The newly revealed extortion attempt came about after Gates entered into an affair with Mila Antonova, a Russian bridge player, the Journal reported.

Epstein paid for Antonova’s software coding education and later asked Gates for reimbursement, according to the paper.

Gates didn’t pay Epstein, the spokeswoman said.

“Mr. Gates had no financial dealings with Epstein,” she said.

A spokesperson for Gates didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for more information.

Antonova has discussed in public how she met Gates during a bridge tournament.

“I didn’t beat him, but I tried to kick him with my leg,” she said in a video posted in 2010.

Antonova wanted to start a bridge teaching business and was connected to Epstein through Boris Nikolic, a Gates adviser, according to documents obtained by the Journal. Nikolic and Antonova both told the Journal that they met with Epstein.

Nikolic said he regretted meeting with Epstein. Antonova said she wasn’t aware of Epstein’s criminal past.

“I just thought he was a successful businessman and wanted to help,” she said.

When Epstein agreed to pay for the software coding school, he said he was doing so because “he was wealthy and wanted to help people when he could,” Antonova said.

Epstein died in federal prison while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Days before his death, which was ruled a suicide, he named Nikolic as a backup executor in a new version of his will. Nikolic said he wasn’t informed of the decision before the change was made and, following Epstein’s death, refused to serve as an executor.

“He couldn’t have listed Bill because that would have been too obvious, so he chose me,” he told the Journal. “I have come to believe it was likely a retaliatory move against Bill Gates.”

Then-President Bill Clinton welcomes Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to the White House in a 1993 file image. (William J. Clinton Presidential Library)

Multiple Meetings

Epstein was also connected to a number of other prominent people, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, CIA Director William Burns, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former Barclays CEO Jes Staley.

He also distributed funds to various institutions, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Gates was scheduled to meet with Epstein more than six times, including during dinners at Epstein’s luxury townhouse in New York, the Journal reported. Gates also flew on Epstein’s plane in 2013, flight records show, and attended multiple events, such as the Edge Dinner, at the same time as Epstein.

Gates, whose foundation has poured millions of dollars into public health efforts around the world, has said that the meetings were driven by a desire to obtain more money for the efforts.

“I made a mistake in judgment that I thought that those discussions would lead, literally, to billions of dollars to global health,” Gates said during a conference in 2019, several months after Epstein died.

He also said that “any people with a reputation spending time with him probably gave him an undeserved sense of being back in the mainstream or not being a pariah.”

Gates said again on CNN in 2021 that he hoped to raise billions of dollars for philanthropy through the dinners.

“When it looked like that wasn’t a real thing, that relationship ended,“ he said. ”But it was a huge mistake to spend time with him, to give him the credibility of being there. There were lots of others in that same situation but I made a mistake.”

Gates wrote in one email after meeting with Epstein that “his lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.”

Gates and his longtime wife, Melinda Gates, announced in 2021 that they were divorcing. Melinda Gates later said Bill Gates’s relationship with Epstein played a role in the split.

“I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein,” she said.

Melinda Gates said she met with Epstein once to see who he was.

“And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterward, so, you know, my heart breaks for these young women, because that’s how I felt,” she said. “And here, I’m an older woman. My God, I feel terrible for those young women. It was awful.”

Bill Gates said later on NBC that he should have listened to his wife: “Melinda’s advice was sound, and I should have followed it sooner than I did.”