Jeffrey Epstein threatened to expose an affair Bill Gates allegedly had with a Russian bridge player in 2010 when the Microsoft co-founder declined to join his philanthropic venture, according to a report on Sunday.
The disgraced pedophile, who killed himself in 2019, appeared to threaten Gates over the alleged affair with Russian card-wiz Mila Antonova in a 2017 email, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Gates met Antonova in 2010, with the two playing in a tournament together after she moved to the Bay Area to work as a software engineer, the newspaper said.
While Antonova acknowledged that she was on friendly terms with Gates during a 2010 video about her love of bridge, the two allegedly had a brief romance while Gates was still married to his then-wife, Linda Gates, sources told the Journal.
Epstein, meanwhile, met Antonova while she was looking for financial backers for a bridge academy.
In the 2017 email, Esptein called on Gates to reimburse him for the cost of investing in Antonova’s project, the Journal reported.
The message came just after the tech titan declined to join the convicted sex offender’s multi-billion-dollar charity he was trying to kick off with JPMorgan Chase.5
“Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” a spokesperson for Gates said.