Bill Gates was allegedly threatened by the late Jeffrey Epstein over an affair the tech mogul had with a young Russian bridge player in the early 2010s, a shocking new report revealed. Gates reportedly turned down an offer to join an Epstein “philanthropic” venture, thus leading to the blackmail.
Gates is said to have first met Mila Antonova in 2010, shortly after she moved to the San Francisco area, during a bridge tournament. After meeting, they exchanged some communication before eventually beginning a short affair. Gates was still married to his now ex-wife Melinda.
Antonova’s connection to Epstein reportedly came later while she pursued a degree for a software coding degree and sought financial backing for a bridge academy. The New York Post wrote about these details, saying:
Gates met Antonova in 2010, with the two were playing in a tournament together after she moved to the Bay Area to work as a software engineer…
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.
Fast forward to 2017, and Bill Gates received an email from Jeffrey Epstein asking him to reimburse for the costs of backing Antonova’s ventures. The timing of the email was certainly curious, as it came on the heels of Gates’ rejection to partner with Epstein for a massive charitable organization he was funding, in part it is suspected, to rehabiliate his name after being convicted of sex crimes.
“The rejection triggered the email asking the billionaire to pay him back for Antonova’s studies, sources told the Journal, suggesting Epstein was attempting to blackmail Gates over the alleged relationship, which by then had been over for years,” the Post continued.
For her part, Antonova said she never interacted much with Epstein and did not know the intimate details of his sordid background. She claims she thought he was just “successful businessman and wanted to help.”
“I am disgusted with Epstein and what he did,” Antonova said of her business relationship with him in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. She declined to comment on her past relationship with Gates.
“I don’t know why he did that,” she told the Journal. “When I asked, he said something like, he was wealthy and wanted to help people when he could,” she explained.
The affair with Antonova is not Gates’ first rodeo with extramarital activities. In 2021, Gates admitted to violating his marriage vows for a full twenty years with a former Microsoft employee. That tryst ended shortly before Gates left the company to, like Epstein had done, focus on philanthropy of various sorts.
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