The Epstein files should end Bill Gates's philanthropic career
The troubling photos, emails and text messages should signal the start of the end for our self-anointed humanitarian-in-chief. The Gates Foundation's do-nothing board of directors also must be removed
Last August, I wrote a piece criticizing the news media for its failure to include Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation in its reporting on the Epstein files. This was a big oversight, I argued, given how significant Epstein’s association with Gates was—and given how likely it was that Gates would be prominently featured in the forthcoming releases of the Epstein files.
Now the Department of Justice has released the files, and the contents are, as predicted, damning for Gates. In a sober, rational world, they would end his philanthropic career and raise existential questions for the Gates Foundation, which boasts a multi-billion-dollar commitment to “empower women and girls.”
The files released to date include an array of deeply troubling photos, emails and text messages that serve as grim reminders of the very-hard-to-explain relationship the world’s most revered philanthropist had—for years—with the world’s most notorious sexual predator.
In the same way that many other industry titans and public figures have been exorcised from polite society over their ties to Epstein, it is time for Gates to be removed from the $86-billion foundation he created 25 years ago.
The photos found in the Epstein Files include a picture of a grinning Gates with his 60-year-old body pressed close to a young woman, below.
This follows a report from the Wall Street Journal two years ago, describing how Epstein apparently had a habit of bringing young models to his meetings with Gates—women who say they were abused by Epstein.
Before any of these photos surfaced, Gates, through a spokesperson, had “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.”
Numerous other powerful actors have faced calls to resign from professional or public life for far less serious contradictions. Even Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, faces demands to step down, from both Republicans and Democrats.
Why aren’t we seeing similar high-profile calls for Bill Gates to be removed from the Gates Foundation? How can the world’s most celebrated humanitarian body be subject to fewer demands for accountability—around ethics and morals—than the Trump administration?
Where is the outcry from the philanthropic and aid sectors, which constantly profess their commitment to equity and justice?
And where is the American news media? While many outlets are covering Gates’s appearance in the Epstein files, where are the op-eds and editorials calling on Gates to be formally investigated and forced out of public life?
While social media is alive with sharp criticism of the Microsoft founder, I’ve only seen one news media story calling on Gates to face consequences. The University of Washington’s student newspaper, “The Daily,” published a great editorial calling on UW to remove the Gates name from the many buildings the family has sponsored across campus.
The newspaper reports that it reached out to UW administrators for comment and got no response. This is not surprising. It speaks to the power Gates wields. UW, like thousands of other organizations with financial ties to the Gates Foundation, does not want to bite the hand that feeds it.
In my book, “The Bill Gates Problem,” I profiled in detail the enormous financial power the Gates Foundation has over the University of Washington—around $2 billion in donations to date, in addition to numerous institutional roles the Gates family has played at the public school over the years. As I reported, this influence appears to have presided over restrictions on academic freedom and distortions of research.
All of this to say: there are lots of reasons beyond Jeffrey Epstein that UW should end or radically restructure its relationship with the Gates Foundation. It is unfortunate that it might take a disgraced pedophile to finally open up an honest public debate about the foundation’s questionable behavior.
Among the more damning documents to emerge from the Epstein Files are a series of emails—apparently drafts that Epstein was working on—which contain a range of allegations, from helping Gates “get drugs, in order to deal with consequences of sex with russian girls , to facilictating his illicit trysts, with married women, to being asked to provide adderall for his bridge tournaments.”
(This language is copy and pasted from Epstein Files, uncorrected for grammar and spelling.)
Another email that begins “Dear bill” includes this passage:
To add insult to the injury you then implore me to please delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda and the description of your penis. You also made it clear to me that I am not to refer to [REDACTED] as that is another topic that must remain between the two of us.
Melinda Gates, when recently asked by NPR about these allegations, didn’t address them specifically. She simply said they filled her with “unbelievable sadness.”
“For me, it’s personally hard whenever those details come up because it brings up some very, very painful times in my marriage,” she told NPR. “I left my marriage. I had to leave my marriage. I wanted to leave my marriage. I felt I needed to eventually leave the foundation. It’s just sad. That’s the truth. It’s kind of like, ugh, at least for me, I’ve been able to move on in life. And I hope there’s some justice.”
Bill Gates, meanwhile, continues to deny or downplay his association with Epstein. He claims the allegations found in the Epstein Files about him are false, and says he committed no misconduct toward women in his relationship with Epstein.
It seems unreasonable to give Gates the benefit of the doubt, however. As I profiled in detail last summer, his account to date is marked by troubling contradictions and omissions. The reason I wrote that piece was to argue that we didn’t need to wait for the new Epstein files to be released to start demanding accountability from Gates.
Melinda Gates now seems to agree. In her recent NPR interview, she said the people who chose to associate with Epstein—specifically including her ex-husband—must be made to answer questions about “the muck.”
I think the interrogation needs to go further than that. The institutions that associated with Epstein also need to be held accountable. This includes the Gates Foundation.
Gates Foundation staff spent years discussing a philanthropic project with Epstein. The proposed charitable fund never came to fruition, but the Epstein Files show the resources and planning that went into the proposal. All of the foundation’s contact with Epstein happened after Epstein’s 2008 sex crime conviction involving a minor.
Numerous high-ranking Gates Foundation staff were in direct contact with Epstein, including former chief financial officer Richard Henriques, former foundation legal counsel Connie Collingsworth, former deputy director of the foundation’s global health work, Gabrielle Fitzgerald, and Bill Gates, himself. If foundation staff had any reservations about working with the registered sex offender, the enthusiastic exclamation points in the message below do not convey this.
A search of the Epstein Files also shows that Bill Gates’s one-time right-hand man, Boris Nikolic—a former employee of the Gates Foundation, and a key intermediary between Gates and Epstein—appears in 14,536 documents. Nikolic’s correspondence with Epstein is at times personal in nature, including (below) one casual discussion of a young “hot blue eyes mexican chick.”
Nikolic has never responded to my press inquiries, including questions about the Epstein files.
The correspondence between Epstein and various foundation staff appears to have given Epstein non-public information about the foundation’s work at times. It may have also positioned him to influence the direction of the philanthropy. In the Epstein files, for example, are details about an internal strategy meeting at the foundation on childhood immunizations, and questions about a potential new strategy.
Documents also show that Epstein was scheduled to visit the Gates Foundation’s headquarters in Seattle in 2011. Not long before Epstein’s scheduled visit, The Daily Beast profiled how Epstein “escaped a hefty jail sentence despite overwhelming evidence of sex crimes with dozens of young girls”—part and parcel of the high-profile news coverage that continued to draw attention to Epstein’s predatory behavior.
Even if the foundation cared nothing about Epstein’s victims, wasn’t the philanthropy concerned about the safety of the many, young female staff working at the foundation’s Seattle headquarters? Doesn’t inviting a predator like Epstein into the foundation raise serious HR problems? I haven’t seen any public resignations from Gates Foundation employees over Epstein, but that may be because employees are terrified they might violate the draconian NDAs the foundation makes employees sign.
The foundation’s institutional decision to pursue a philanthropic relationship with someone like Epstein is not just reckless, but outrageous. The project gave the pedophile credibility and legitimacy—at the highest levels of polite society and elite philanthropy—that almost certainly helped immunize him from scrutiny, and that probably enabled Epstein’s campaign of abuse.
Whether or not the foundation is held accountable may turn on the grim logic of money and desperation. How many critics can Gates and the Gates Foundation silence with big donations? How many allies can they purchase? How many people and institutions are willing to continue looking the other way?
Accountability for Gates shouldn’t depend on the good sense or ethics of the rest of us, acting individually. The $86-billion foundation, which has deep impacts on the lives of billions of people around the globe, should be subject to meaningful, structural checks and balances. This isn’t currently the case.
Years ago, I began examining problems with the governance at the Gates Foundation, including its rubber-stamp, do-nothing board of trustees. The board—in theory—exists to hold the foundation accountable, to make sure that its activities remain focused on charity.
As I reported as far back as 2022, some of the board members are not actually independent, having financial or institutional ties to Gates or the Gates Foundation that could fairly be seen as conflicts of interest. Bill Gates, himself, chairs the board, and reportedly has special veto power. The CEO of the Gates Foundation, Mark Suzman, also sits on the board. Can we really expect someone who collects $1.5 million in annual compensation from the Gates Foundation to criticize or challenge his boss?
When I began speaking to experts and legal scholars years ago, they cited a clear need for the Gates Foundation’s board to address the growing scandals Gates faced around Epstein and other misconduct allegations. As I wrote in The Nation in 2022, a test of the “board’s independence will be whether it has the mettle to challenge Bill Gates, and to push the kind of accountability that we’re seeing from other large institutions. In a world in which big tech and big finance—industries that are renowned for questionable behavior—increasingly appear to have a surer moral compass [around Epstein] than the world’s leading humanitarian organization, it’s hard to see how a legitimate, independent board could do anything else.”
The Epstein-Gates affair is becoming increasingly awkward for the Gates Foundation. Last week, it was widely reported that the foundation announced that Bill Gates was dropping out of a public speaking gig, apparently because the foundation worried the controversy surrounding the Epstein Files would be a distraction. If Bill Gates can no longer do the job of publicly representing the Gates Foundation, mustn’t he be removed?
We should not expect the foundation’s board to take serious action unless they, themselves, face serious threat of investigation (or removal)—from the Washington State Attorney General, the IRS, or Congress. If that isn’t already happening, it should be.
It may seem odd to think that philanthropy—the practice of giving away money—needs government regulation, but it is important to consider the enormous public resources involved. Tax scholars report that for every dollar a billionaire gives away, up to 74 cents would be otherwise paid in taxes. If our tax dollars are richly subsidizing Gates’s philanthropic career—and that of the many other billionaires following in his footsteps—we need strict oversight.
Just as the U.S. Department of Justice took legal action to curb Microsoft’s excesses under Gates’s leadership in the late 1990s, we need state and federal action to address the dangerous model of unaccountable power that Gates has innovated through philanthropy. And just as Bill Gates abruptly left (or was forced off) Microsoft’s board of directors in 2020, as he faced allegations of misconduct, it is time for Bill Gates to be removed from the Gates Foundation.
In recent weeks, James Comer, the head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told the press that he is getting bipartisan calls from colleagues to bring Gates to Washington to explain his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. This is a good thing, and I hope Congress follows through—and expands its investigation beyond questions of sex to interrogate questions of power.
Billionaire philanthropy is one of the most powerful and least regulated forms of political power in the United States, and many of the Gates Foundation’s activities—including and beyond collaborating with Epstein on philanthropy—are impossible to place under the common definition of charity. The entire field of elite philanthropy is long overdue for a major overhaul, or dismantling—and the Epstein-Gates affair should be the trigger.
READ MY FOLLOW-UP STORY HERE: