Melinda French Gates says she immediately recognized pure evil when she met Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking with the Guardian, French Gates said one of many things contributing to her decision to divorce Bill Gates in 2021 after 27 years of marriage was his unfaithfulness to her and that he maintained contact with Epstein, despite her objections.
But then, in January, the U.S. Justice Department released a tranche of Epstein emails which contained messages drafted by Epstein alleging that her then husband had caught an STI after having extramarital sex with “Russian girls” and was planning to sneak antibiotics to his wife.
Gates denied these claims, saying: “Apparently, Jeffrey wrote an email to himself. That email was never sent. The email is false…” but French Gates told NPR soon after that she was happy to be away from “all the muck” and that the men involved. These men, including her ex-husband, would have to answer for their own behavior, she said.
“He was an abhorrent human being, a horrid man, and so in these situations,” French Gates told the Guardian. “This is a hard topic for me, you need to know that – my heart goes out to the young girls. I just spoke the truth, which is they deserve some peace, and they deserve some justice.”
Gates said she remains frustrated at Epstein’s male cohorts who are clamming up while Epstein’s victims demand justice and answers.
“What I know is that bad things happen in darkness. We need to have more transparency,” she told the Guardian. “… “The justice system didn’t do its job. It did not do its job. Full stop. This could have been stopped. And so again, I think that’s why, finally, we are having a reckoning in society. If we don’t want children to be harmed, the justice system has to work.”
Gates added that when she met Epstein she found him so repugnant that he gave her nightmares.
When asked was set her off, Gates demanded “Have you ever in your life been around somebody that you just know is evil? There you go. You just have your answer. We need to listen to our feelings about people.”
At one point while asked to explore her Epstein experience, Gates became so emotional she couldn't complete sentences: “Any woman who has ever been around somebody who is evil or had an experience and then if you’re around somebody else who is evil. Just no, no.”
“We have to put women, far more women, in positions of power,” she added after regaining her composure. “It’s why I do the work that I do,” she says. “When women step into their full power, we have a different lens on society. We are the bedrock of society. We are the bedrock of the family.”
The Guardian reports that Gates is committing $215 million in new funding towards women’s health care this month, and she laments the degradation of women’s rights in the modern U.S. political climate.
“My granddaughters are growing up with fewer rights than I had,” she said.
