Epstein Update

Yesterday I ran into a data item that validates the contrarian theory of Epstein's business model that I outlined two weeks ago. On May 7, I said,

Let's say Epstein was running honey traps. Let's take two examples of public figures who may have rubbed up against the Epstein operation the wrong way, Bill Gates and Alan Dershowitz. Let's say there were cameras secretly filming every last indiscretion, whatever may or may not have been alleged. Dershowitz fought his own allegation and was able to make it go away. Gates wound up divorcing his wife after a photo emerged of him and Epstein with a few other people, fully clothed, at a dinner.

Gates maintained that's as far as anything went, and no secret camera footage emerged to contradict him. Yeah, his wife divorced him, but it appears there was evidence he was propositioning female subordinates completely independent of anything Epstein may or may not have had on tape. I doubt if anything he may or may not have done under Epstein's auspices had much of anything to do with the divorce. In any case, Gates is as rich as he ever was.

From the New York Post -- although this story's been everywhere from the Guardian to the Hindustan Times:

Jeffrey Epstein threatened to expose an affair Bill Gates allegedly had with a Russian bridge player after 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 whiz Mila Antonova in a 2017 email, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

, , , Epstein . . . met Antonova while she was looking for financial backers for a bridge academy and later paid for her to attend software coding school, according to the report.

In the 2017 email, Epstein called on Gates to reimburse him for the cost of investing in Antonova’s coding education, the Journal reported.

The message came just after the tech titan declined to join the convicted sex offender’s multibillion-dollar charity he was trying to kick off with JPMorgan Chase, sources told the newspaper.

. . . “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.

The spokesperson added that Gates never paid up over the threat and that he had “no financial dealings” with Epstein.

Gates and his wife Melinda divorced in 2021. The Micosoft board investigated him for unrelated affairs with and attempts to hit on Microsoft employees, but although he wasn't removed, he left Microsoft voluntarily in 2020. It sounds as though, even if the affair with Antonova did in fact take place, it was brief and of little consequence in comparison to all the others Gates was conducting, Epstein's threat was de minimis, and it wouldn't have been a factor that led either to his divorce or his departure from Microsoft, even if Epstein had exposed it.

I think this supports my view that Epstein wasn't making his money from honey traps. Gates simply refused to cooperate, while Alan Dershowitz successfully defended himself against accusations that he molested anyone on Epstein's island. The most serious of these was dropped last November:

Virginia Giuffre admitted she might have been wrong to accuse Alan Dershowitz of sexual abuse in a new court filing, bringing to an end a three-year legal battle between the pair.

Ms Giuffre said in a statement to The Independent that she long believed she had been trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Mr Dershowitz, but that she was very young at the time and had been in a stressful and traumatic environment.

“I now recognise I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr Dershowitz,” the statement, first reported by The New York Times, read.

Dershowitz hardly mentions this now; he's much more miffed that his Martha's Vineyard neighbors shun him because he defended Trump in his first impeachment than anything to do with Epstein.

It's also worth noting that the blackmail attempt against Gates was made in 2017, long after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea for soliciting an underage girl and two years after his Lolita Express 737 was mothballed. We must assume Epstein's fortunes by then were at a low ebb, and the Gates ploy was little more than a desperation move. Two years after that, he was arrested and jailed on charges of underage sex for the second time. By then, he'd run out of money for payoffs, protection, lawyers, and anything else.

This leaves open the separate question of where his money came from. I don't think blackmail was ever his main source of income; it sounds like he wasn't all that good at it. I'd bet he was mainly a con artist and embezzler who was good at ingratiating himself with rich and powerful people and used his connections with them to expand his circle of marks -- if he couldn't get money from them directly for his "philanthropies", he could, as he did with Dershowtiz, get them to do favors. Other accounts suggest he was very good at looking like he was a lot richer than he ever actually was.

And if he worked for the CIA or Mossad, that says more about the state of our intelligence agencies than it does about Epstein, but it does indirectly confirm Epstein was mainly a con artist.