'Very painful times in my marriage': Melinda French Gates reacts to newly released emails from Epstein Files

Melinda French Gates reacted to the new release of the Epstein Files that claimed Bill Gates once contracted a sexually transmitted infection during an affair, and said the filed bring to mind "memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage". "But I have moved on from that. I purposely pushed it away and I moved on," Melinda said in a recent NPR interview.

“I think we're having a reckoning as a society, right? No girl, no girl should ever be put in the situation that they were put in by Epstein and whatever was going on with all of the various people around him,” Melinda said.


People involved with Epstein must answer for their actions, including her ex Bill Gates, she said. "Whatever questions remain there -- I can't even begin to know all of it -- those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband, they need to answer to those things. Not me."

Melinda was responding to host Rachel Martin's question seeking her response to the newest allegations. "Your ex-husband Bill is named in the newest tranche of Epstein files," she told Melinda. "There are new alleged details about his past behavior, and I wanna give you the opportunity to respond in whatever way you want to."



Bill Gates has already responded to the revelations calling them "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," the spokesperson said.

Bill Gates spoke about his association with Epstein earlier and called it a "huge mistake". He said he had dinners with Epstein hoping he would donate to the Gates Foundation.

Melinda and Bill announced their divorce in 2021. In her book, Melinda wrote about Bill's infidelity and his links to Epstein.

“I’m able to take my own sadness and look at those young girls and say, ‘My god, how did they — how did that happen to those girls?’ “ she said in the NPR interview. “And so for me, it’s just sadness, sadness for — you know, I’ve left, I left my marriage, I had to leave my marriage, I wanted to leave my marriage, and so it’s just sad. That’s the truth.”