Melinda French Gates stated that her ex-husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, absolutely needs to answer for the fresh wave of allegations stemming from the newly released Jeffrey Epstein documents, as reported by The Hill. The documents in question were released Friday, and they contain some pretty explosive claims that are definitely causing major headaches for the tech titan.
The batch included two emails that Epstein sent to himself back in July 2013. One email seemed to be a draft message intended for Gates, alleging that Gates asked the convicted sex trafficker to help him erase emails concerning a sexually transmitted disease. Even more shocking, the email claimed Gates requested antibiotics that he could then “surreptitiously” give to his wife at the time, Melinda.
The second email was apparently a draft announcement regarding Epstein’s resignation from the Gates Foundation. In this draft, Epstein claimed he had actually helped Gates “get drugs” to “deal with consequences of sex with [R]ussian girls.” It’s currently unclear whether Epstein ever actually sent either of those two emails to anyone else.
She’s definitely making it clear that the responsibility for these claims falls squarely on her ex-husband
Melinda French Gates made it clear on NPR’s “Wild Card” podcast that these are not her battles to fight or her secrets to keep. She made a powerful statement, saying, “Whatever questions remain there of what I don’t — can’t even begin to know all of it, those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband.” She concluded her thought bluntly: “They need to answer to those things, not me.”
You can certainly understand why she’s drawing a firm line here. She and Bill Gates divorced in 2021, and she suggested that having all these sordid details resurface has been extremely difficult. She admitted that whenever these details pop up, it’s personally hard because it “brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage.”
However, she quickly added that she has moved past the pain. She purposefully pushed the memories away and has found herself in a “really unexpected, beautiful place in my life” now. It’s great that she’s focusing on her own journey and isn’t letting this old drama define her.
While Melinda is demanding answers, Bill Gates’s team is strongly pushing back against every single claim. A spokesperson for Gates issued a statement calling the allegations “absolutely absurd and completely false.” They argued that the only thing these documents truly prove is how incredibly frustrated Epstein was that he couldn’t maintain an ongoing relationship with the tech founder. In their view, the documents just show “the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”
Published: Feb 4, 2026 12:30 pm