If Bill Gates was a member of the U.S. Congress, he likely would be investigated over recent disclosures of his association from 2011 to 2019 with the late convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is not a public official.
He is a private person who wields power around the world by virtue of his wealth. He is the co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest private foundation in the world. Gates also is regularly featured on news pages weighing in on diverse matters ranging from climate change to workforce robotics.
Gates seemingly is insulated from the mundane measures that hold “little people,” including members of Congress, accountable for bad behavior.
Gates relationship with Epstein came under renewed scrutiny last week when it was announced that he and his his wife of 27-years, Melinda Gates, are divorcing. The Wall Street Journal reports she warned him to stay away from Epstein after the couple met Epstein at his New York City mansion in 2013.
Depravity on Steroids
After years of alleged sexual exploitation of young girls, Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting an underage girl for sex in Florida. That prosecution stemmed from a complaint by parents that Epstein had sexually abused their 14-year-old daughter.
A decade later, GOP Pres. Donald Trump’s first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, was forced to resign when questions arose about his handling of Epstein’s excessively lenient plea deal as the top federal prosecutor in Miami.
Epstein was arrested again in July 2019 after The Miami Herald published an investigation of the highly questionable collaboration between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers in 2005.
Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell in September 2019 after being charged with sex trafficking in Florida and New York.
Gates denies having a business relationship or friendship with Epstein but he knew Epstein well enough to cause his wife concern.
The New York Times reported Gates wrote a 2011 email to colleagues stating Epstein’s “lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.”
Gates also flew from New Jersey to Palm Beach, FL, in 2013 on Epstein’s infamous private jet, which is called the Lolita Express, a reference to a novel about an older man who sexually abused a 12-year-old girl.
Media Lab
Gates says he did not do business with Epstein but did Epstein do business with Gates?
The New Yorker reported last year that Epstein arranged for Gates’ 2014 donation of $2 million to the Media Lab at MIT University.
Joi Ito, the director of the Media Lab, was forced to resign in 2019 after MIT announced it was investigating him for, among other things, obscuring the relationship between Epstein and Gates’ donation. The New Yorker said Ito wrote in an internal email, “This is a $2M gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein,”
Moreover, two former Gates’ foundation science advisers are linked to Epstein, including Boris Nikolic, a Harvard Medical School trained physician who was chief advisor for science and technology to Bill Gates. Nikolic was named a “successor executor” of Epstein’s will.
Melinda Gates
One might sympathize with Melinda Gates, 56, the mother of the couple’s three children and a global advocate for women and girls.
Melinda Gates launched a startup in 2015 called Pivotal Ventures to help develop solutions to problems affecting U.S. women and families. She recently wrote a book entitled, The Moment of Life: How Empowering Women Changes the World. ”
According to a joint statement announcing their intention to divorce, the couple will “continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives.”
And so Bill Gates will likely join the ranks of former Democratic President Bill Clinton and England’s Prince Andrew, among others, who have been linked to Epstein but have thus far managed to remain above the fray.