Bill Gates’ alleged affair with Russian bridge player: report
Jeffrey Epstein threatened to expose an affair Bill Gates allegedly had with a Russian bridge player after the Microsoft co-founder declined to join his philanthropic venture, according to a report on Sunday.
The disgraced pedophile, who killed himself in 2019, appeared to threaten Gates over the alleged affair with Russian card-wiz Mila Antonova in a 2017 email, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
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 Journal reported.
The message came just after the tech titan declined to join the convicted sex offender’s multi-billion-dollar charity he was trying to kick off with 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 2008 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, while declining to comment on her alleged relationship with Gates.
Following her tournament match with Gates, which resulted in the billionaire’s victory, Antonova was inspired to start her own business venture teaching people to play the game she loved.
Boris Nikolic, a top adviser to Gates at the time, pointed Antonova to Epstein, then a well-connected financier, who agreed to meet her at his Manhattan townhouse in 2013, sources told the Journal.
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