The Wall Street Journal has been doing a deep dive into Jeffrey Epstein and the relationships that he had with famous people.
They’ve done two separate pieces that we reported on about the people he had meetings with scheduled on his calendar, including people like Obama/Biden officials and the big Democratic donor who funded the E. Jean Carroll rape suit against Donald Trump.
Now they’ve also done a piece on Epstein’s relationship with Bill Gates. We’ve reported in the past how the association appeared to interfere with his relationship with his wife Melinda, as she herself said. But it also appears that Epstein had knowledge about an affair that Gates had with a Russian bridge player and tried to use it to threaten Gates to do what he wanted.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Gates met the bridge player Mila Antonova in 2010 when she was in her 20s and he would have been around 54. At the time he would still have been married to Melinda. According to the paper’s sources, Gates met Antonova at a bridge tournament and then had an affair with her.
Epstein later met her in 2013. She dealt with him when she was trying to get funding to start an online school to teach bridge. In November 2014, Antonova stayed briefly at an apartment in New York City provided by Epstein, but she says she “didn’t interact with him or with anyone else while there.” He also paid for her to attend software coding school.
Mila Antonova, the Russian bridge player, declined to comment on Gates and said she didn’t know who Epstein was when they met. “I had no idea that he was a criminal or had any ulterior motive,” she said of Epstein. “I just thought he was a successful businessman and wanted to help.” She added: “I am disgusted with Epstein and what he did.”
Anotonova said Epstein told her he was wealthy and just wanted to help her.
But then in 2017, Epstein was trying to get Gates to go in on a huge deal he was trying to set up with JPMorgan. He had already been friends with Gates for several years.
At the time, Epstein was trying to set up a multibillion-dollar charitable fund with JPMorgan that would potentially pool money from some of the world’s wealthiest people. Epstein proposed that JPMorgan set up the fund with a minimum $100 million contribution per individual and pay him millions of dollars in fees, the documents show. In addition to the fees, the disgraced financier saw the fund as a way to rehabilitate his reputation, according to people he told of his thinking. It hinged on securing support from Gates, the documents show.
He wanted to get Gates on board but hadn’t managed to persuade him. So Epstein sent Gates a message asking to be reimbursed for what he paid out of Antonova’s school. The “implication behind the message, according to people who have viewed it, was that Epstein would reveal the affair “if Gates didn’t keep up an association between the two men.”
Gates’ people acknowledged that Epstein tried to hold a “past relationship” over his head to threaten him.
“Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” said a spokeswoman for Gates.
His people say that he didn’t pay.
This raises a lot of questions. How did Epstein find out about the affair? Did Gates or Antonova tell him, or maybe he had the apartment he had let her stay in bugged? How many other people did he have stuff on, with all the connections he had?
Almost two years ago, I wrote about Gates’ weird responses about his relationship with Epstein and I think these two videos sum it up well.
He kept insisting it was just “dinners.”
Then there was this truly creepy response when he was asked if there’s a lesson that people can learn from this. He smirked and responded, “Well, he’s dead, so…”