Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates told a congressional panel that files released by the Justice Department in January only added to his embarrassment over interacting with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The Epstein Transparency Act, passed in late 2025, mandated that the U.S. Justice Department release millions of files related to investigations into Epstein, whose death in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial after a federal indictment was ruled a suicide.
The House’s oversight and government reform committee, led by Republican James Comer, has interviewed more than a dozen people in recent months about their interactions with Epstein, including former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Howard Lutnick, the current commerce secretary under President Donald Trump.
Gates sat for an interview with the committee on June 10, but the transcript was released on Tuesday. Among the topics discussed were a pair of email drafts Epstein sent to himself, and released by the Justice Department, which contained knowledge of some of Gates’s indiscretions.
“You now, the foolishness of my spending time with him is about 100 times higher after I see the January emails,” said Gates.
Here’s a closer look at what was learned from the Gates interview.
No knowledge of Epstein victims
Gates said he met Epstein about a dozen times beginning on Jan. 31, 2011, at the latter’s New York and Paris residences; at the Four Seasons in New York; at a D.C. airport; on a private jet as both were flying to Florida for separate purposes; and at Gates’s own Seattle offices. Some of the meetings in New York, Gates said, were attended by others, from Norwegian politicians to former Barclays executive Jes Staley to magician David Blaine.
Gates was under the impression that Epstein could connect him with wealthy donors for the Gates Foundation’s global health initiatives. While meetings with a few individuals were engineered through Epstein in 2014 — including with Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman and Montreal-born media magnate Mort Zuckerman — they did not result in commitments, and Gates said he stopped interacting with Epstein in December of that year, and didn’t answer any of Epstein’s emails after that.
Former U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi drew angered reactions from survivors of Jeffrey Epstein after she delivered a closed-door testimony about her handling of documents related to the convicted sex offender.
Gates said that while he saw a few women around Epstein during some of these encounters, they appeared fleetingly and all appeared to be adults. He briefly posed for photos with a few of the women, at Epstein’s request.
“I never spent time with any women who I was aware were victims, and so that’s why I’ve enumerated very carefully when I ever saw any of those admin assistants, because, tragically, as you say, it appears in the press now that some of those women were indeed victims,” he said.
Despite their interactions, the late financier remains something of an enigma to Gates.
“To this day, I don’t find a fully satisfactory explanation of … how he got his wealth and a variety of things.”
What he knew about Epstein’s past
Gates only came to know Epstein after the financier had already served 13 months behind bars on state charges in Florida beginning in 2008, which included a count of procurement of minors for prostitution.
Gates said he was aware of an Epstein conviction of a “sexual nature,” because, “either I looked it up or somebody told me.” He said he was not aware that Epstein was a registered sex offender as a result of that conviction.
“I’d met with people who’d been convicted of crimes and served their time,” said Gates. He added that he “did not understand that justice had not been done,” until learning of the now-famous 2018 Miami Herald series on Epstein, which depicted an unusual set of legal negotiations leading to his conviction.
Gates said the knowledge of the conviction ensured he kept an arms-length distance, and he rebuffed attempts at a social relationship, including rejecting repeated invites to Epstein’s Caribbean island as well as one — relayed through Gates Ventures advisor Boris Nikolic — to Paris’s Crazy Horse strip club.
“I did feel at the time that, by narrowly defining his role as simply referring us to people who would give philanthropically to [the Gates Foundation’s Global Health division], that he would have no role in those things, and he would receive no compensation,” Gates said.
Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam at one point asked Gates, “And since the experience with him, do you do more thorough background checks now?”
Gates: “Absolutely.”
The connector and those emails
It can only be speculated, but the lack of vetting may have been due to the fact that Gates was connected to Epstein through someone who had been one of his advisers for about four years, Dr. Boris Nikolic.
This would eventually have severe ramifications for Gates, because Nikolic had knowledge of two of Gates’s extramarital affairs with Russian women — including once when Gates had advised Nikolic to be a potential “alibi” when he met with one of the women in London.
Gates had also told Nikolic in 2013 that his wife, Melinda, was aware of the two extramarital affairs with the Russian women.
For reasons that remain unclear, Nikolic asked Epstein to help advise him on negotiations that took place upon Nikolic’s exit from Gates’s companies in September 2013. As a result, said Gates, Epstein made veiled comments that year that seemed to indicate he knew more about the Microsoft founder than what they had discussed in face-to-face interactions.
“I believe that [Epstein] found out about the affairs through Dr. Nikolic,” Gates told the congressional panel.
The tranche of documents released earlier this year revealed that in July 2013, Epstein wrote email drafts to himself that contained knowledge of two Gates affairs, as well as a reference to a sexually transmitted disease. Gates told the panel on June 10 he never had an STD.
Congress members have debated whether the drafts were written in the voice of Epstein himself, or if Epstein was writing something in the voice of Nikolic to potentially communicate to Gates.
“Now that I see the January release of documents, it appears that in many cases he, at least in emails to himself, was sort of rehearsing how either he or he coaching someone else might choose to blackmail me, but none of those messages were ever sent to me,” said Gates, adding that Nikolic also didn’t bring up the affairs in emails or in person as they separated professionally.
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Gates also said he was surprised “a lot” by media reports that Nikolic was named an executor in Epstein’s will.
Despite all this information, Gates rejected suggestions by some Congress members that Nikolic orchestrated any kind of grand plan by bringing Epstein into the picture in 2011.
“I think, at some point, Boris realized that introducing Epstein was a mistake.”
Wife sensed trouble brewing
In a 2022 interview with CBS News, Melinda French Gates described Epstein as an “abhorrent human being.”
Gates’s answers to the committee reveal that his ex-wife, heavily involved in their philanthropic foundation before their split, wasn’t just engaging in hindsight bias.
“She had a very negative reaction to Mr. Epstein and was saying, ‘Look, you know, either get these donations, you know, or maybe you should just cut it off now,'” he said in reference to a fall 2013 dinner, French Gates’s only personal interaction with Epstein.
Asked to speculate on her thinking, Gates chalked it up to “her instinct about arrogant men, or I’m not sure what, but she certainly showed better judgment than I did.”
Gates also revealed that while Nikolic had “one foot out the door” in the spring of 2013 as he was considering external opportunities, it appears his wife at the time was extremely concerned by what the advisor knew about the couple’s personal affairs.
“His actual exit was somewhat accelerated by the fact that I shared with my wife at the time that he was aware of affairs that I had, and she and I discussed that I should probably have him leave sooner rather than later.”
It was, Gates said, “a quicker departure than would have happened otherwise.”
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