Late pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein reportedly threatened to expose an affair Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates allegedly had with a Russian bridge player after he declined to join his philanthropic venture.
Epstein who committed suicide in 2019, appeared to threaten Gates over the alleged affair with Russian Mila Antonova in a 2017 email, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Gates met Antonova in 2010, with the two playing in a tournament together after she moved to the Bay Area to work as a software engineer, the newspaper said.
While Antonova acknowledged that she was on friendly terms with Gates during a 2010 video about her love of bridge, the two allegedly had a brief romance while Gates was still married to his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, sources told the Journal.
Epstein, meanwhile, met Antonova while she was looking for financial backers for a bridge academy and later paid for her to attend software coding school, according to the report.
In the 2017 email, Epstein called on Gates to reimburse him for the cost of investing in Antonova’s coding education, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The mail came just after Gates declined to join the convicted sex offender’s multi-billion-dollar charity he was trying to kick off with US bank JPMorgan Chase, sources told the newspaper.
Gates, 67, has previously admitted to and expressed regret for having several meetings with Epstein in the 2010s after Epstein’s conviction in Florida on charges of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution as part of efforts to raise money for the Gates Foundation.
“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,” a spokesperson for Gates said.
The spokesperson added that Gates never paid up over the threat and that he had “no financial dealings” with Epstein.
Antonova told the Journal that she didn’t know who Epstein really was when they met, thinking he was just a “successful businessman and wanted to help.”
“I am disgusted with Epstein and what he did,” Antonova said, although she declined to comment on her alleged relationship with Gates.
