Bill Gates said Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of sex crimes, tried to blackmail him, the NYT reports.
The Microsoft founder’s testimony was submitted to the U.S. House Oversight Committee. In it, Gates said that during the period when he was in contact with Epstein, he did not understand the full scale of the crimes associated with the financier.
According to Gates, Epstein possessed confidential information about his personal life, including extramarital affairs, and used it for his own purposes.
“These affairs had nothing to do with my interactions with Epstein, but they were painful for my family,” Gates noted.
Previously published materials alleged that the Microsoft founder had tried to conceal from his wife information about a sexually transmitted infection after encounters with “Russian girls” and had turned to Epstein for antibiotics. Gates called those claims “absurd.”