By Andrea Widburg
I ignored the story that Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a divorce. Their personal life holds no interest for me, although I care that Bill Gates is having an outsize say in both the climate change debate and in the response to COVID. His skills as a computer programmer and his genius as a shark, scooping up other people’s creations, do not make him qualified to weigh in on the climate or COVID. But as I said, his personal life was a “meh” — that is, right until the Wall Street Journal hinted that Bill Gates’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein led directly to his divorce.
It’s been public information for a long time that Bill Gates met Epstein several times beginning in 2011. Even the New York Times, back in October 2019, reported on those meetings:
Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who committed suicide in prison, managed to lure an astonishing array of rich, powerful and famous men into his orbit.
[snip]
Few, though, compared in prestige and power to the world’s second-richest person, a brilliant and intensely private luminary: Bill Gates. And unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.
The official Bill Gates line is that the two men were talking about philanthropy. Still, the whole thing was weird. For example, again according to the WSJ, in 2011, Gates emailed a colleague saying of Epstein, “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” According to a Gates spokeswoman, Bill was just talking about the unique décor in Epstein’s mansion and the way Epstein would “spontaneously bring[] acquaintances in to meet Mr. Gates.”
I wouldn’t refer to either “décor” or business practices as a “lifestyle,” but maybe Bill does because he’s an odd bird. Most people, though, when they think of Jeffrey Epstein’s “lifestyle,” don’t think of curtains, dining room sets, or spontaneous business meetings. They think of Pedophile Island and the Lolita Express. If Bill really was referring to Epstein’s immoral proclivities, at least he conceded that “it would not work for me.”
In any event, the point I’m making is that it’s not news that the famously eccentric-to-the-point-of-weird Bill Gates knew Epstein surprisingly well. It’s not even news that Melinda Gates warned her husband as early as 2013 against pursuing an acquaintance with Epstein.
What’s new is the connection between the divorce and Bill’s hanging with Jeffrey. Thus, The Wall Street Journal reports:
According to the documents reviewed by the Journal, Ms. Gates and her advisers held a number of calls in October 2019 when the New York Times reported that Mr. Gates had met with Mr. Epstein on numerous occasions. Mr. Gates once stayed late into the night at Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, the Times reported.,
As always, the Daily Mail is blunt. It headlined its story “REVEALED: Melinda Gates has been consulting divorce lawyers since October 2019 when Bill’s meetings with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed and she decided marriage was irretrievably broken.'”
The Daily Mail is right to be intrigued because there are just a few ways to view the timing of Melinda going to the lawyers when Bills friendship with Epstein became public. The first way to view it is that it’s just a coincidence. Under this scenario, Melinda had long planned on October 2019 as the starting point for pursuing divorce for her own reasons (e.g., the timing was right when it came to a long, drawn-out process that would affect her children).
The second way to view it is that it was one thing to warn Bill away from Epstein privately, but another thing altogether to have the world know that her husband was friends with the notorious pedophile. That is, the publicity was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
And then there’s the third, most titillating viewpoint, which is that, once the relationship between Epstein and Bill became public, Melinda became very worried that people would start digging and soon discover much worse than a philanthropic relationship. I’m not asserting that this is the case. I’m merely mentioning it as a reasonable scenario based on the slender evidence currently available.
Since I dislike and distrust Bill Gates, I wouldn’t mind his being derailed from his machinations regarding both climate and COVID. This divorce might do it, especially if there’s an Epstein problem.
