The Gates of wrath
Melinda ‘reflects on resilience’ as lurid claims of husband’s wild parties emerge
SMILING with her three children, and no sign of her husband, it was a very pointed message.
Melinda Gates posted the picture on social media to mark Mother’s Day in the US.
The estranged wife of Bill Gates said she ‘loved being their mother’ and urged other women to ‘reflect on your own resilience’. now using the name Melinda French Gates – to incorporate her maiden name – it was her first public comment since her joint statement with the Microsoft founder eight days ago announcing their divorce.
The image shows Mrs French Gates, 56, being hugged by her children several years ago – Phoebe is now 18, Jennifer 25 and Rory 21. Conspicuously absent is Mr Gates, 65.
Twitter users were quick to point
‘He’d hire strippers to swim naked’
this out, with one writing there was ‘no Bill in the photo’. The image was also posted on instagram, where it got 42,000 likes.
it comes amid reports that Mr Gates’s friendship with the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein was a factor in the split.
Mrs French Gates was said to have been speaking to divorce lawyers since news of her estranged husband’s dealings with Epstein became public in 2019. Her concerns dated back to 2013, when she went with her husband to meet Epstein at his home in new York. She was supposedly ‘ furious’ afterwards, the Wall Street Journal reported.
When Epstein was arrested and killed himself in 2019, the spotlight turned on to powerful men who had associated with him even after he had served more than a year in jail a decade earlier for having sex with an underage girl.
A spokesman for Mr Gates said in 2019 that he ‘regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognises it was an error in judgment’.
Lurid claims emerged last night about Mr Gates’s bachelor days – including him holding naked parties with strippers and claims of womanising even after he began dating Melinda.
Journalist James Wallace wrote two books on the Microsoft founder in the 1990s and said Mr Gates was ‘no choirboy’. ‘A lot of those Microsoft kids back then, they were young guys in pizza-stained T-shirts for two or three days working on software code,’ he said. ‘Then they would have some pretty wild parties. He wasn’t just this little computer nerd.’
Wallace wrote that national media wanted to keep the flow of tech stories they obtained from Mr Gates and therefore ‘didn’t report on the wild bachelor parties that Microsoft’s boyish chairman would throw in his Seattle home, for which Gates would visit one of Seattle’s all-nude nightclubs and hire dancers to come to his home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool’.
His womanising put strain on his early relationship with his future wife, Wallace claimed.
‘He continued to play the field for a while, especially when he was out of town on business, when he would frequently hit on female journalists. [Melinda] French was well aware of Gates’s womanising, and consequently their relationship ran hot and cold.
‘At one point, they broke up for nearly a year, reportedly because Gates refused to make any kind of commitment. When they got back together again in 1992, however, the relationship grew closer and stronger.’
Mr Gates’s longtime friend and former Microsoft executive Vern Raburn corroborated the book’s claims but added that Mr Gates was ‘very proud of the fact he hadn’t done any of that’ since his 1994 marriage
The Gateses’ £93billion divorce paves the way for the biggest settlement since Amazon’s Jeff Bezos split with his wife MacKenzie.