American philanthropist Melina French Gates said Bill Gates’s meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier accused of child sex crimes, was one of "many things" that contributed to the power couple’s divorce last year.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, 66, and Melinda French Gates, made the announcement of their divorce on Twitter in May 2021. The divorce is among the most high-profile separations in recent times.
Slamming the billionaire for meeting Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial, French Gates told talk show host Gayle King on CBS Mornings, she acknowledged that she had once met Epstein, saying that afterward she "had nightmares."
"I wanted to see who this man was, and I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door," she said, without clarifying when the meeting occurred.
"Any of the questions remaining about what Bill's relationship there was, those are for Bill to answer, but I made it very clear how I felt about him," said French Gates.
She described Epstein in the meeting as "abhorrent," and "evil personified," but declined to say if she requested her husband to stop meeting with him.
Bill Gates, in a statement in 2019, said that he “regretted” meeting with Epstein for philanthropic reasons.
After their divorce, media reports highlighted Bill Gates’s inappropriate behaviour at the workplace and his relationship with Epstein.
A The Wall Street Journal report had said Microsoft's board had begun an investigation into Gates's previous romantic relationship with an employee, before he stepped down from the board in March 2020.A spokesperson for Bill Gates said "There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably." She told the publication that his "decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter. In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier".
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Melinda Gates had expressed concerns regarding Epstein in 2013.
The Gateses had said they would keep working together at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. They were married in 1994 in Hawaii. They met after she began working at Microsoft as a product manager in 1987.
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