Addressing the email in January, a spokesman for Gates said: “These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false”.
“The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates, and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”
New photographs of Gates posing with women whose faces are redacted were also contained in three million Epstein files released by the Trump administration on January 30.
Gates told his team that the convicted paedophile asked to take his pictures with his assistants after meetings.
“To be clear I never spent any time with victims, the women around him,” Gates said on Tuesday.
“It was a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein,” he said, adding that he apologised to those who were “drawn into this because of the mistake that I made”.
Gates also admitted to his team that he met Epstein in 2011, after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution, but that though he was aware of “some 18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel, he had not checked Epstein’s background.
Although his wife at the time, Melinda French Gates, from whom he is now divorced, expressed concerns in 2013, he said that he had continued meeting Epstein.
“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 behaviour,” he reportedly told staff. “To give her credit, she was always kind of sceptical about the Epstein thing.”
Though Gates visited Epstein in Germany, France, New York and Washington, he told his team that he had never visited Epstein’s island.
Gates said that Epstein’s links to billionaires and other prominent people “normalised” his own dealings with the convicted paedophile.
Epstein had “talked about the kind of intimate relationship he had with a lot of billionaires, particularly Wall Street billionaires”.
Gates also admitted that his relationship with the late paedophile cast a cloud over the Gates Foundation.
“It definitely is the opposite of the values of the foundation and the goals of the foundation,” he said. “And our work is very reputational sensitive. I mean, people can choose to work with us or not work with us.”
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