MUST SEE: Bill Gates, In a Congressional Interview, Admitted…

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates told lawmakers that deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had contemplated blackmailing him using information about his extramarital affairs, including affairs with two Russian women.

The revelations, delivered before the House Oversight Committee, represent the most detailed public accounting yet of the relationship between one of the world’s wealthiest men and the disgraced financier whose network of influence and criminal conduct has continued to roil American public life years after his death.

Gates sat for a voluntary transcribed interview with the committee on June 10. The transcript was released to the public this week, triggering immediate and widespread coverage. The Microsoft co-founder opened with a carefully worded statement that sought to establish a clear distance between his personal failings and the conduct that made Epstein notorious. “I have never victimized anyone,” Gates said.

He acknowledged visiting Epstein’s New York properties on multiple occasions for meetings he believed would advance his philanthropic goals but was emphatic: “I never went to his island, his ranch, or his Florida home.”

The affairs at the center of the blackmail narrative are confirmed. Gates admitted to the committee that he had engaged in extramarital relationships while married to Melinda French Gates, including affairs with Karima Nigmatulina, a Russian nuclear physicist, and Mila Antonova, a Russian bridge player. These admissions were not entirely new, as Gates had acknowledged affairs with Russian women to Gates Foundation staff in February, but the congressional testimony provided the most formal and detailed account of how those affairs became entangled with Epstein’s known methods of gathering and exploiting leverage over powerful men.

Pressed further by committee members, Gates also disclosed a third affair, with medical entrepreneur Alice Jacobs Nesselrodt, which predated his 2011 introduction to Epstein. He reportedly appeared caught off guard during that portion of the questioning when shown a July 2013 email in which Epstein referenced that relationship, having initially suggested Epstein knew only of the two Russian women.

The revelation of the third affair complicated the tidy narrative Gates had sought to present and raised new questions about the full scope of what Epstein knew about the billionaire’s private life.

Gates told the committee he first met Epstein in 2011 through an adviser who believed the disgraced financier could help connect Gates with wealthy individuals interested in supporting global health initiatives. At the time, the attraction of Epstein’s network was his apparent ability to unlock philanthropic capital from some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Gates was, at that point, deeply committed to the mission of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he believed Epstein could be a vehicle for bringing in major donors to causes he cared about deeply.

Those hopes proved misplaced. Gates told the committee he ended contact with Epstein in December 2014 after concluding that Epstein’s promises “led to nothing.” The philanthropic collaboration that Epstein had dangled as the basis for their relationship never materialized into any meaningful commitments. But by the time Gates cut ties, Epstein had already acquired damaging personal information about the tech billionaire’s extramarital affairs, and he appears to have recognized the potential value of that information as leverage.

The blackmail dynamic played out through an intermediary whose name appears more than 14,000 times in the Justice Department’s Epstein files: Boris Nikolic, a physician and biotech venture capitalist who served as an adviser to Gates. Nikolic had knowledge of two of Gates’s extramarital affairs, including the two Russian women. On one occasion, Gates had used Nikolic as what the transcript describes as a potential “alibi,” sending Nikolic in his place when Gates ran late to a meeting with one of the women in London. Gates had also disclosed to Nikolic that Melinda Gates was aware of the two extramarital affairs.

The critical connection between Gates’s personal conduct and Epstein’s leverage-gathering operation came when Nikolic, as he was departing from Gates’s employ in September 2013, involved Epstein in the negotiations surrounding his exit from Gates’s companies. For reasons Gates told the committee he cannot fully explain, Nikolic asked Epstein to advise him during that professional transition. As a result, Epstein made veiled comments that year suggesting to Gates that he knew considerably more about the Microsoft founder’s private life than what they had ever discussed directly.

A 2013 memo authored by Epstein, and now part of the Justice Department’s document release, claimed that Gates had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from Russian women and sought antibiotics to secretly pass to his then-wife without her knowledge. Gates denied before the committee that he ever had an STD. Committee members debated whether the emails, which were drafts addressed to Epstein himself, were written in his own voice or were rehearsed communications he intended to send or coach others to send.

“Now that I see the January release of documents,” Gates told the committee, “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.”

The conclusion Gates reached and stated plainly to the committee: “He never blackmailed me, but looking at these emails, it raises a serious probability that he contemplated blackmailing me.” He acknowledged that Epstein “was working to use information about my infidelities, in addition to many lies that he layered on top, to pressure me to reengage with him” after Gates had cut off contact in 2014. The effort to pressure Gates into re-engagement was, by Gates’s account, unsuccessful.

The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that Epstein had emailed Gates in 2017 seeking reimbursement for a software-coding course he had funded for Mila Antonova, one of the Russian women with whom Gates admitted having an affair. According to that reporting, the message carried an implicit threat to expose the affair if Gates declined to back a multibillion-dollar philanthropic fund Epstein was hoping to launch with JPMorgan Chase. Gates declined, and Epstein’s implicit threat did not escalate into overt blackmail.

The committee conducting this investigation, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), is the same panel that has interviewed more than a dozen individuals as part of its ongoing Epstein probe.

That investigation was given new momentum by the Epstein Transparency Act, passed in late 2025, which mandated that the U.S. The Justice Department released millions of files related to investigations into Epstein, whose death in a Manhattan jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial was ruled a suicide. The Act made the release of the Gates transcript possible.

Previous witnesses before the same committee have included former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who were subpoenaed and appeared in February, as well as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Gates’s appearance was voluntary, a decision his legal team made in the face of the document release that had already put his name prominently in the public record.

Melinda French Gates, who divorced Bill Gates in 2021 after 27 years of marriage, addressed the subject publicly in February after the Epstein documents began circulating. She told NPR that reading about her ex-husband’s communications with Epstein was “personally hard” because it brought up memories of “very painful times” in their marriage. She was precise about where she drew the line on further commentary: any additional questions about Bill Gates’s relationship with Epstein and his affairs are for him to answer.

Gates’s opening statement to the committee sought to address the nature of his relationship with Epstein directly by challenging the characterization that the two were close friends or confidants.

“While he may have sought to foster a personal relationship, I was never interested in that and never reciprocated,” Gates said. He noted the significance of a fall 2013 dinner at which Melinda French Gates met Epstein for what proved to be the only time. Her reaction was sharply negative. Gates recalled that she told him either to secure the philanthropic commitments from Epstein’s network or to cut off the relationship entirely. Her instinct about Epstein, Gates conceded, was better than his own.