Jeffrey Epstein drafted notes to and about Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, suggesting that he engaged in extramarital sex, according to emails that the Justice Department released on Friday.
Mr. Epstein sent the July 2013 emails to himself. It is not clear if Mr. Epstein ever sent the emails to Mr. Gates.
A representative of the Gates Foundation said, “These claims — from a proven, disgruntled liar — are absolutely absurd and completely false. The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”
Mr. Epstein wrote the messages about Mr. Gates not long after his attempt to broker a venture between Mr. Gates’s foundation and JPMorgan Chase fizzled out — depriving Mr. Epstein of what he had hoped would be a gusher of income.
In one of Mr. Epstein’s emails, written in the style of a personal journal entry, the convicted sex offender wrote that he had helped Mr. Gates acquire drugs “in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls” and that he had facilitated trysts for Mr. Gates with married women.
In another email, Mr. Epstein blasted Mr. Gates for choosing to “disregard and discard our friendship developed” over six years. He accused Mr. Gates of abandoning him in order to preserve his reputation.
In a 2021 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Mr. Gates called his relationship with the disgraced financier “a huge mistake.” He also sought to downplay his interactions with Mr. Epstein, saying he had several dinners with Mr. Epstein, with the hope of getting him to generate donations to the Gates Foundation.
Mr. Gates’s relationship with Mr. Epstein — which began around 2011, after Mr. Epstein had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor — was among the factors that led his former wife, Melinda French Gates, to seek a divorce.
In one of the typo-ridden 2013 emails, Mr. Epstein wrote that he had decided to resign from his role with the Gates Foundation and BG3, a think tank founded by Mr. Gates, because Mr. Epstein had been “caught up in a severe martial dispute between Melinda and Bill” and had been asked by Mr. Gates to participate “in things that have ranged from the morally inappropriate to the ethically unsound” and “potentially over the line into illegal.”
Jessica Silver-Greenberg is a Times investigative reporter writing about big business with a focus on health care. She has been a reporter for more than a decade.
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