At the end of January, a huge batch of documents from the Epstein Files were released. That document dump completely changed everything for some very powerful people. Dominoes have fallen in the British royal family, Norway’s royal family, across Europe’s political class, and across academia and the business world. One thread of this: some very odd documents related to Bill Gates. Gates spent time with Jeffrey Epstein for years after Epstein’s conviction as a sex-trafficking predator. Gates liked Epstein’s company, and while Gates later said that he only “went to dinners” with Epstein until 2014, I’m not sure anyone believes that. One of the documents involved Epstein writing an email to himself about Gates, Russian girls and Bill’s need for antibiotics. It read like Epstein manufacturing kompromat on Bill Gates, right? Well, look at this.

Bill Gates this week admitted to having two affairs with Russian women while married to Melinda French Gates and apologized to staff at his charity for his past ties to sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — while maintaining he was not part of anything “illicit.”

“I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder said in a town hall for his Gates Foundation on Tuesday, Feb. 24, according to a recording reviewed by the The Wall Street Journal.

A spokesperson for Gates tells PEOPLE in a statement that “this was a scheduled townhall with employees, which Bill does twice a year. In the conversation, Bill answered questions submitted by foundation staff on a range of issues, including the release of the Epstein files, the foundation’s work in AI, and the future of global health. In the townhall, Bill spoke candidly, addressing several questions in detail, and took responsibility for his actions.”

Scrutiny has been renewed around Gates’ history with Epstein — who died in federal custody in 2019 after being accused of human trafficking — because a trove of documents released by the U.S. Justice Department showed yearsold draft emails Epstein wrote himself in which he accused Gates, 70, of contracting a sexually transmitted infection from “Russian girls” and then asking for Epstein’s help in order to hide it from his then-wife. A spokesperson for Gates had previously called those claims from Epstein “absolutely absurd and completely false.”

However, Gates acknowledged on Tuesday, he’d had affairs with a “Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities.”

Gates reiterated to staff that “he never spent any time with victims, the women around [Epstein],” according to the Journal. He also said it was a “huge mistake to spend time with Epstein” after first meeting the sex offender in 2011 — long after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.

He said this week that he did not properly check Epstein’s background but was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel. “Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates said, according to the Journal.

[From People]

Yeah… after the January document dump, Bill Gates came out hot, with his spokesperson furiously denying the Epstein email and suggesting that every part of Epstein’s claims were fictitious. Now it turns out that Gates was sleeping with Russian women, and I’d be willing to bet that Epstein knew all about it. Who’s to say that Epstein didn’t set it up? I like how Bill’s spokesperson is still huffy as hell too – like, no one cares where and why Gates made these confessions, we care about the confession itself and how his story keeps changing. The next big reveal will be that Gates was still communicating with and seeing Epstein far longer than he previously admitted.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.