Speaking in an interview to Fortune, Melinda French Gates (the Fortune article refers to her as “French Gates”) hinted at her divorce with Gates and discussed the projects she’s working on to protect women, reminding many of another recent interview in which she sounded off on what Bill had been up to and hammered him for his connection with the infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Melinda wed Bill Gates in 1994 and had three children with him, Jennifer (25), Rory (23), and Phoebe (19), sp. Bill and Melinda divorced in 2021, but they continue to head the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation together, for now at least.
In the Fortune interview, she said that the divorce was “unbelievably painful,” but then went on to add that she kept working at the foundation with him, saying “I kept working with the person I was moving away from, and I need to show up and be my best self every single day.”
It’s somewhat surprising that she kept working at that foundation with him as, in another recent interview, she said, when speaking about Gate’s friendship with Epstein:
“It was many things. But I did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein.I made that clear to him.”
She added that she only met Epstein “exactly one time, because [she] wanted to see who this man was.” Continuing, she went on to say “And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door.”
Why did she regret it? Because Epstein was, in her view, “evil personified.” In her words: “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterward. So my heart breaks for these young women.”
And between that, the affair Bill admitted to, and other problems that Melinda wouldn’t discuss, their marriage had to come to an end. As she put it:
“It wasn’t one moment or one specific thing that happened. There just came a point in time where there was enough there that I realized it just wasn’t healthy, and I couldn’t trust what we had.”
But, though she was sickened by Epstein and left her husband in part over that friendship, Melinda is certainly not on our side. In the Fortune interview, he also spoke about abortion and the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision, saying “It would be devastating in any country. But to see it in the highest-income country in the world, to have had it on the books for that long and then roll it back—that’s an enormous setback to gender equality.”
And she founded a woke organization called Pivotal Ventures, which is a venture capital fund that she said is “about how we can get women and people of color further along in the United States, faster. For me, this really comes down to looking at key areas: tech, finance, media, politics. You get more equity in those four industries and you will change all of society.”
Combining the two topics, woke capital and her love of abortion, Melinda Gates said that the issue is one venture capital can’t fix, arguing that instead more female politicians are needed. In her words:
“I look at the root cause. What’s the systemic issue? The systemic issue is that we don’t have enough female politicians in our country. We’re not at gender parity, and we’re not close. So when I look at that Supreme Court bench, I think about how we got there and who put them on there. It was a male-dominated Senate that put them there.”
“We have to get more funding for female politicians at all levels, and we have to look at the barriers that keep them from getting there. Until we get women represented in all seats of power, you’re not going to have representation of society on the Supreme Court. Because if you look at how Americans actually feel about Roe v. Wade, no matter which side of the aisle they’re on, what was done doesn’t represent what people believe.”
So she’s woke and as much a leftist as her husband. But at least she called out his Epstein connection.
