Gates's responds to Epstein, digs hole deeper
As the Gates Foundation ramps up its damage control efforts, Bill Gates personally addresses foundation staff about his ties to Epstein. His remarks only magnify the need for his removal
The day after I published an article calling for Bill Gates to be removed from the Gates Foundation, the philanthropy held an internal meeting at which Gates spoke to staff about his ties to sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Gates’s talk yesterday, the second scheduled event the foundation has done to address Epstein in recent weeks, may have backfired. Instead of assuaging the concerns of the foundation’s 2000+ employees, Gates ended up exposing new, troubling details about the scope of his relationship with Epstein—who, at the time Gates was spending time with him, had already served time in prison for a felony sex crime involving a minor.
While Gates has long refused to say how many times he met with Epstein, he yesterday admitted to having met with Epstein in locations all over the globe—Germany, France, New York and Washington. He also admitted to having flown on one of Epstein’s jet, part of a fleet of planes commonly called the ‘Lolita Express.’1
Most explosive, Gates admitted to having affairs with two Russian women, noting that Epstein learned about these relationships. This admission follows scandalous allegations from the Epstein files about Gates having “sex with Russian girls.” Gates, through a spokesperson, had previously told the press that “These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false.” (Read more of the allegations here).
His new comments raise questions about whether there may be some truth to some of the allegations in the Epstein files. A press inquiry to Gates, asking for clarification and for a transcript of Gates’s remarks, generated no immediate response. If a response is forthcoming, I will update this article.
Gates’s account of his association with Epstein has evolved significantly since he was first forced to address the issue in 2019. To date, his explanations have been marked by inconsistencies and omissions, and a refusal to answer direct questions.
Yet the Gates Foundation has always stood firmly behind their patron. The Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report on Gates’s newest comments, quoted a foundation spokesperson praising its leader because he “spoke candidly, addressing several questions in detail, and took responsibility for his actions.”
This comment speaks volumes to how far removed the Gates Foundation remains from anything resembling accountability on Epstein. It should be clear that Bill Gates isn’t taking responsibility. If you examine his remarks, you find a man claiming ignorance and issuing empty apologies, if not also describing himself as an unwitting victim of Epstein.
Below is a transcription of the first part of Gates’s speech (provided to me by an inside source):
“Basically, it was a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein. For me to associate with him. I had people at the foundation—the top lawyer, CFO at the time, head of the philanthropic relationships—-spend time with him. And, you know, I apologize for that.”
(A day before these remarks, I had reported on how extensively foundation staff—including former chief financial officer Richard Henriques and former foundation legal counsel Connie Collingsworth, and others—had communicated with Epstein. The Gates-Epstein affair, I argued, is not just a personal problem for Bill Gates, but an institutional problem for the entire foundation.)
“I’m sure everybody involved has regrets, but, you know, it’s completely on me. I should have looked into his background more…..I didn’t dig into that. I should have. Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, 100 times worse in terms of, not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear that it was ongoing bad behavior. You know, those crimes are horrific….It definitely is the opposite of the values of the foundation.”
This excuse should sound familiar. It’s usually the first thing that a public figure says when their name bubbles up around Epstein, something on the order of: ‘I met him a few times, but I had no idea he was a predator or pedophile.’
For Gates, the ignorance card is particularly non-credible, especially at this very late stage.
We now know that all of Gates’s contact with Epstein came after Epstein’s 2008 felony sex crime conviction involving a minor, and after Epstein was already a registered sex offender. The news media widely covered the conviction at the time it happened. And in the years ahead, after Epstein’s release—-at the same time Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were meeting with Epstein—-the news media continued to profile new, explosive allegations against the sexual predator.
Melinda French Gates has also gone public saying that she explicitly told her ex-spouse to stop meeting with Epstein at one point, calling him “evil personified”—yet Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation continued to do so.
At a certain point, we all need to accept that Gates knew, or should have known, what a monster Epstein was. Given that, and given the many open questions about the nature and scope of the Epstein-Gates affair, should Bill Gates be allowed to remain in charge of a philanthropy that boasts a multi-billion-dollar portfolio of work empowering women and girls?
One of the more troubling revelations from the Gates-Epstein affair was that Epstein appears to have had a habit of bringing young women to his meetings with Gates—some of whom later came forward as victims of Epstein. Gates, instead of seeing the red flags, appeared to lean in, taking awkwardly friendly photos.
Before the photos emerged, Gates, through a spokesperson, “denied that young and attractive women participated at their [Gates and Epstein’s] meetings.” In an interview earlier this month, Gates seemed to double down, asserting that in his association with Epstein, “I never met any women.” And in his talk yesterday afternoon, Gates continued to push a similar narrative: “I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit…To be clear I never spent any time with victims, the women around him.”
As I wrote in my 2023 book, which includes a detailed chapter on the Epstein-Gates affair, Bill Gates has an army of people working to keep his reputation sterling and his person free from harm. This includes an extremely powerful legal team and extremely well funded PR operation at the Gates Foundation. Are we really supposed to believe that Gates and his handlers failed to do the most basic due diligence on Epstein—before inviting the registered sex offender to descend on the Gates Foundation’s headquarters? Before engaging in a years-long institutional relationship with Epstein to work on philanthropy? Before flying around the world to take meetings with the pedophile?
Supposing we accept that to be true, that Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were ignorant to Epstein’s behavior, does this in any way change the need for accountability?
Let’s say the Gates Foundation isn’t run by amoral, ends-justifies-the-means, power brokers willing to overlook criminal sexual behavior against women and children. Let’s say the Gates Foundation is instead run by grossly negligent or incompetent people who simply can’t see outrageous behavior and misconduct.
Does that make things better? Does it obviate the need for Bill Gates, and other top leaders, to be removed from the foundation? Is there any other way to rationalize or excuse Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation’s reckless, outrageous decision to associate with Jeffrey Epstein—repeatedly over the course of several years?
Gates’s remarks come three weeks after the foundation CEO held another damage-control event with staff. According to the Financial Times, and confirmed by my sources, the meeting appeared to erupt into an open vent session for staff who expressed how they were “struggling to reconcile their commitment” to humanitarianism with “what they’re hearing and reading about [Bill Gates’s ties to Epstein].”
The foundation’s CEO, Mark Suzman, tried to assuage employee concerns, offering a notably mild sense of contrition: “I feel somewhat sullied by just any association of Epstein with the work we do.”
Really? Somewhat sullied?
What about ashamed? Disgraced? What about publicly resigning in protest?
One foundation employee I spoke to yesterday cynically said staff may not want to challenge the foundation on Epstein because they don’t want to risk their high-paying jobs at the Gates Foundation. (Suzman, who may be the highest-paid employee, takes home around $1.5 million.) That may be true for some people, but I’d be surprised, and disappointed, if we don’t see growing public pressure on the Gates Foundation in the days ahead, both internally and externally. I’m already seeing one such effort, posted on LinkedIn, by a group of anonymous partners of the foundation:
My own view, as I wrote on Monday, is that the Gates Foundation, institutionally, no longer has the legitimacy to undertake a serious process of accountability. For years, the foundation’s governing board has sat on its hands and failed to address the Epstein-Gates affair. Since 2019, they could have and should have done a major investigation and dealt with this issue. For this reason, I think the entire board, most importantly Bill Gates, needs to be removed.
If state and federal regulators aren’t already putting pressure on the foundation, they should be.
Read the previous pieces in this series (here, here) and the following piece (here)
This reference to Gates’s flight on Epstein’s fleet has been updated. I was later able to secure an actual transcript of Gates’s remarks—-the Gates Foundation had refused to give this to me—in which Gates claims he flew on Epstein’s Gulfstream jet, distinguishing it from Epstein’s “infamous” Boeing 727.
All of Epstein’s planes appear to have been implicated in Epstein’s illicit activities, and the press has, at times, referred to them all as part of Epstein’s “Lolita Express.” One of the first articles linking Gates to Epstein’s plane, from 2019, was headlined, “Bill Gates flew with Jeffrey Epstein on the Lolita Express in 2013.”