Financier Jeffrey Epstein allegedly blackmailed Microsoft founder Bill Gates, threatening to reveal his secret relationship with a 20-year-old Russian bridge player .
The Wall Street Journal writes it. According to the American newspaper, Gates would have had an affair with the young bridge champion Mila Antonova, whom he met in 2009 at a bridge tournament. He, 55 years old at the time, had 20 years behind him spent with his wife Melinda, who in 2021 asked for and obtained a divorce also due to her husband's controversial acquaintances with Epstein.
The girl had landed in the US to launch a project: teaching the game of bridge online . In an amusing video from 2010 (which is still on Youtube), she herself tells of having arrived in America three and a half years earlier - quoting Gates - to demonstrate that bridge is not just "for old ladies". Indeed, it is a "gym for the mind", he assures. In the video he also claims to have played a year earlier, in Washington, against the businessman: "I didn't beat him, but I tried to kick him with my leg."
Antonova in 2013, looking for funding, would have contacted Epstein through Boris Nikolic - at the time Gates' confidant and scientific adviser - from whom she would have asked for half a million dollars. In the end, the financier did not invest in the project but the following year he offered her a short stay in a house in New York and paid for her studies to become a computer programmer. Meanwhile he was trying to create a philanthropic foundation with JPMorgan, also to restore a reputation tarnished by a previous conviction for sexual abuse of a minor.
When Gates refused to pay the loans, he wrote some emails where he implied that he wanted to reveal the relationship that the man would have had with the 20-year-old . "They've always met for philanthropic reasons, but Epstein tried unsuccessfully to use a past relationship of Bill's to threaten him," confirmed a spokesperson for the Microsoft founder.
(Unioneonline/vf)
