Jeffrey Epstein Threatened To Blackmail Bill Gates Over Alleged Affair With Russian Bridge Player

Bill Gates allegedly had an affair around 2010. Jeffrey Epstein was aware of the relationship and used the information to send a threatening email to Gates in 2017, suggesting he would make the affair public. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, he sent the email after failing to convince the Microsoft cofounder to invest in his efforts to form a significant charitable fund with JPMorgan.

Gates’ affair was with Mila Antonova, a Russian woman in her 20s at the time. It started after the two met through competitions for the card game bridge. The paper found a 2010 YouTube video, shown below, of Antonova talking about the game and noting her meeting with Gates at a national tournament.

Antonova met Epstein around 2013 when she was looking for funding for BridgePlanet, a business that would teach others how to play bridge. She claimed that she did not know about Epstein’s crimes – it was five years after his guilty plea in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution – when she told him about her business.

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After her aims to fund BridgePlanet failed, Epstein paid for Antonova to attend a coding camp for a career in software development. Epstein sent Gates an email in 2017, requesting reimbursement for the cost of Antonova’s programming camp. He indicated that he was aware of Gates’ affair and was willing to blackmail him. Gates never paid and it remains unknown whether the two were ever in contact again after the 2017 email.

A spokesperson for Gates told the WSJ that he had met with Epstein “solely for philanthropic purposes” and that Epstein had “tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates.”

Epstein died in a New York jail cell in 2019 after dozens of other women accused him and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual abuse and prostitution.