“I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” Bill Gates told his staff at a Gates Foundation town hall late last month—an attempt at sunshine, or at least damage control, as the long shadow of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has stretched out over the most powerful private philanthropy in the world.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which reviewed a recording of Gates’s remarks, he confirmed for the first time publicly that he had affairs with two Russian women, seeming to address what Epstein described in one of the 3.5 million files as Gates’s “illicit trysts.” Gates generally apologized for his relationship with Epstein, acknowledging that he continued to meet with the disgraced financier through 2014 and flew on his jet, while insisting that he “never stayed overnight” or visited Epstein’s island.
But Epstein’s relationship with the Gates Foundation is another question. Other than a statement on the foundation’s website saying, in part, that “we will continue to review materials released in connection with [Epstein’s communication with Gates Foundation staff],” the convicted sex offender’s reach into Gates’s philanthropic arm—the grants, the grantees, the geopolitics—has remained largely unexamined until now.
Buried among the massive tranche of documents released by the DOJ in January and the roughly 4,000 pages of grants on the Gates Foundation website is yet another complicated Epstein story: ghost-written emails, Middle Eastern intelligence, a personal loan to the former head of a prestigious think tank who allegedly helped afford visas to young Eastern European women.
Between 2013 and 2019, the Gates Foundation provided $8 million in grants to the International Peace Institute (IPI), a think tank that works closely with the United Nations and is focused on multilateral approaches to global peace and security. According to emails released by the DOJ, Epstein appeared to help facilitate a large portion of those funds.
IPI’s longtime former president and CEO Terje Rød-Larsen is now at the center of a very public investigation in Norway into whether he was complicit in corruption, related to his questionable Epstein connection. (Rød-Larsen has denied the allegations against him. In a statement, translated from Norwegian to English by Google, his lawyer said, “Rød-Larsen has previously apologized for his relationship with Epstein and clearly distanced himself from his actions.”)
The Gates Foundation funding was to support a polio eradication campaign in parts of rural Pakistan and Afghanistan, where years of vaccination progress had been undone after a CIA operation in Pakistan in which agents posed as vaccinators while hunting for Osama bin Laden. There is no evidence in the documents that the grant money was used for anything other than its stated purpose. But the files do show, however, how Epstein controlled communication between the two camps, and in return, was able to gather highly classified Middle Eastern intelligence as well as visas for young women.