“Playing with fire.”
So read an April 30, 2018 email Jeffrey Epstein sent to Bill Gates’ chief of staff, Larry Cohen, according to files released by the Department of Justice.
Epstein had just put up Mila Antonova in one of his Upper East Side apartments for the week, he told Cohen. Antonova, a Russian bridge player who toldFortunethrough her lawyer that she had “a relationship” with Gates around 2010, and has been reported elsewhere to have been his mistress, had been receiving financial help from Epstein for years. Epstein wanted Gates to know.
In fact, Epstein had wanted Gates to know for a long time.
Documents released in January by the DOJ show that between 2013 and at least 2018, Epstein helped organize Antonova’s visa, wired her cash, housed her repeatedly in various apartments he kept in Manhattan, and paid for her coding education. Later, Epstein referred to those payments and pressuredthe billionaire founder ofMicrosoftto reimburse him, the emails show.
In one exchange, Epstein invoked the “sanctity of friendship.” In a July 29, 2017 email to Cohen, he quoted what he claimed were Gates’ own words: “If you can help push this out three years that should be enough” — a reference, Epstein said, to housing and bankrolling Antonova after her relationship with Gates ended. Three years had now passed, Epstein wrote. He had “paid for school, helped organize visa,” and Antonova had “to stop bridge tournaments, living day to day on a friends couch with no air con.”
“I know you and Bill share my views on the sanctity of friendship,” he wrote to Cohen.
The pressure campaign around the payments to Antonova was part of an extensive and complex effort by Epstein to bore his way into Gates’ inner circle and to benefit from the Microsoft cofounder’s contacts and influence.Fortune reported on that effortearlier this week.
Antonova’s attorney toldFortuneshe had neither knowledge of Epstein’s efforts to pressure Gates, nor provided “services, information or any other assurance or act in exchange” for his support. The lawyer said Antonova “naively accepted” Epstein’s help, believing he genuinely wanted to assist her.
Five months before he was arrested for conspiring to sex-traffic minors in 2019, Epstein was still emailing Gates asking to be repaid.
“As Gates has said consistently, he regrets meeting with Epstein,” a spokesperson for Gates wrote toFortune. “The files show just how extensively Epstein worked to insert himself into Gates’ life—both directly and through others in Gates’ orbit—and how Epstein continued in these efforts even after Gates stopped meeting and communicating with him. To be clear, Gates never witnessed or engaged in any illicit or illegal behavior.”
Cohen, who was then not only Gates’ chief of staff but also a managing partner at Gates’ private office, Gates Ventures, did not respond toFortune’srequest for comment. (Cohen is now at venture firm Biomatics Capital.)
Antonova’s attorney confirmed in a letter toFortunethat Antonova met Gates at a bridge tournament in 2009 and “maintained a relationship with him for a time.”
Epstein’s relationship with Antonova began with Boris Nikolic, then-Gates’ chief science adviser at the Gates Foundation and at his investment firm, Bgc3. Nikolic was also one of Epstein’s most frequent correspondents, with the two exchanging thousands of emails in the decade between 2009 up until Epstein’s death in 2019.
On May 23, 2013, Nikolic—then still at the Gates Foundation—emailed someone who appeared to be an immigration attorney about Antonova, describing her as a Russian friend who had “overextended her stay in USA” on a boat crew visa. The case, he wrote, would “need to be VERY creative,” adding he was “willing to cover the cost.”
