Pals
Oh, one of those. Jeff gave Bill advice on how to get away from That Woman.
Bachelor sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein gave Bill Gates advice on ending his marriage with Melinda after the Microsoft co-founder complained about her during a series of meetings at the money manager’s mansion, according to two people familiar with the situation.
Gates used the gatherings at Epstein’s $77 million New York townhouse as an escape from what he told Epstein was a “toxic” marriage, a topic both men found humorous, a person who attended the meetings told The Daily Beast.
Bros before hos.
The people familiar with the matter said Gates found freedom in Epstein’s lair, where he met a rotating cast of bold-faced names and discussed worldly issues in between rounds of jokes and gossip—a “men’s club” atmosphere that irritated Melinda.
“[It’s] not an overstatement. Going to Jeffrey’s was a respite from his marriage. It was a way of getting away from Melinda,” one of the people who was at several of the meetings said, adding that Epstein and Gates “were very close.”
How sweet.
Gates may have been an utterly willing and eyes wide open participant. He may have liked the seedy and rapey side of Epstien’s personality and lifestyle. It’s pretty hard to overlook his previous conviction I would have thought.
On the other hand, Epstien was a groomer. Not so much girls – he left grooming them to others – but rich old men. He targeted old rich guys and wowed them with a combination of supposed financial returns and access to a lifestyle of parties, famous celebrities, interesting people and beautiful women. A lifestyle that their wealth had not given them access to, because they were fundamentally too boring. From what I’ve read, the main aim was to separate those old boring men from as much of their money as possible, while gaining introductions to their old, rich boring friends.
No-one has made much sense to date as to how Epstein managed to acquire so much personal wealth. Financial industry insiders say it just doesn’t stack up, but none of his clients have complained. Then again, if you were a titan of commerce and industry, would you want to admit that you’d been duped by a nobody with a good game?
The interesting thing is the whole Epstein affair…and past gatherings dating back through history, make me slightly…and I emphasize slightly…more sympathetic to the QAnon crzies. There IS/WAS a conspiracy of sex trafficking elites. Some of the trafficking DID involve minors. Our Owners are often creepy, creepy people…that is often how they got to where they are, through driven sociopathy.
Marriages can become unhappy situations for a great many reasons, and one or both partners can feel stuck in them. These people can often seek solace among friends which allow them their own space, to vent or to process or even to seek support and advice on constructively moving forward.
So far, from the quoted portions of the story, it seems Bill enjoyed hobnobbing with other ultrawealthy people and discussing issues that let that group feel self-important, and as his marriage deteriorated, he came to this group of friends (including Epstein) for support and advice, and to enjoy their common interests without sharing them with Melinda. It further seems that Epstein advised Bill to seek a divorce, or perhaps helped guide him through the financial implications of it, or connected him with people who could.
There really isn’t that much here. Unhappily-married man stops dragging his unhappily-married wife to social events she doesn’t enjoy, he continues attending said events alone, and he commiserates on his unhappy marriage with friends. Just because the people involved are incredibly wealthy and several are criminals of one stripe or another doesn’t make this story any less banal than any other divorcing couple.
Well, it kind of does though. It may be utterly banal in the sense that you wouldn’t want to hang out with them for the sake of their conversation, but in other senses it’s not, because of who they are and the child-grooming aspect and all the rest of it.
Much like Priss Choss. In himself he’s deeply boring, but because he has a lot of strings he can pull, it’s worth paying attention to what he’s doing. It matters that he pushes the NHS to provide “alternative medicine.”
I mean, sure, Jeffrey Epstein was a sex trafficker and very likely committed all manner of other crimes, and as far as Bill Gates may be suspected of having been involved in any of those crimes, there should be an investigation and a prosecution if necessary, along with public exposure and humiliation and all the rest of it. And the fact that Bill Gates and all manner of other ultrawealthy assholes palled around with Epstein is a stain on their characters that should stalk them and their estates forever.
But gossip-mongering on the level of “One rich asshole in a bad marriage complained about said marriage with another rich asshole who happened to be a sex trafficker, and then got divorced”…just isn’t really noteworthy. It’s gutter-press insinuation-mongering piffle that neither informs nor enlightens, and exists merely to attract eyeballs to the Daily Beast’s advertisers on the reputations of the personalities profiled. Ultimately, unless there’s compelling evidence that links Bill Gates’s divorce to his association with Epstein beyond “Bill Gates has very poor taste in friends but otherwise engaged in completely normal behaviour for someone in a rocky relationship that ultimately ended in divorce”, there isn’t really a reason to suspect this is anything more than gossip-mongering from someone else who was *also* party to these hang-out sessions at Epstein’s and who thereby has an interest in profiting off of said gossip.
I think Seth does have a point here. We should avoid purity policing that we disdain in the woke and the far right.
Seth @ 6 – That assumes that gossip is of no interest. I don’t think that’s true at all.
It may be that the gossip is badly sourced or otherwise dubious, but gossip as such is not trivial or worthless. (There’s plenty of scholarship on the social role of gossip.)
Brian, sorry, but for some reason I have an interest in the ways men talk about women behind their backs. I don’t consider that purity policing.
Seth @6 raises a good point that we should be suspicious of the “source” on this. Anyone who was close enough to Epstein to be hanging around these Epstein-Gates discussions probably is hoping to curry favor with a journalist who might otherwise be writing stories about them. So there’s an incentive to exaggerate and become a good source of gossip.
Yes, that’s a fair point. I’m just saying why I think it matters even though it’s gossip (gossip in the chat about people sense, not the necessarily false sense).
There’s no honor among skeeves?
It doesn’t so much assume as aspire. I agree with you that it isn’t true — otherwise there’d be no eyeballs for the Daily Beast or TMZ or Buzzfeed or what have you to charge their advertisers for, of course. But it *should* be true, ideally.
Plenty of scholarship there may well be, but perniciously spreading innuendo to enforce poorly-evolved and harmful social norms is…well, it may be adaptive in a broad evolutionary sense, but there are a great number of adaptive things that are morally atrocious, and this sort of bullshit is right up there. It’s middle school, but for adults, and apparently the worst kinds of cads and bullies just keep right on dominating everything forever. You may think that is an optimal social organising principle, and you may well have studies that claim to back up that position, but I will simply have to disagree with you.
Again, from the parts of this story you quoted, we have…nothing to go on. To wit, and to belabour the point far more than I probably should, you used
to snarkily infer
And you go on in comment 9 to say
There is absolutely no evidence of what, or even of how, Bill Gates spoke of his wife in Epstein’s (and the source’s) presence. Even assuming both the quotes you supplied are 100% authentic reflections of what happened, there simply isn’t enough detail to infer anything other than that Bill Gates had a failing marriage, Melinda Gates didn’t like hanging out with Epstein et al., eventually she stopped showing up while Bill kept at it, and later on the pair got divorced. In the interim, the failing marriage became a topic of conversation and consolation among friends, including Epstein and the anonymous source of the article.
That is…entirely unremarkable, and should be none of our business. There is nothing enlightening in this. Melinda Gates, as far as we can tell, is not a victim; she was an unhappy spouse, and now she is divorced, and she will remain one of the most wealthy and influential women in the history of the world. And hopefully she and Bill are both the happier, in the long run if not in the moment, for having gotten divorced.
There are a great many ways things could have gone worse: Bill could have curtailed his own social activities to entirely conform to Melinda’s expectations, found them wanting, simmered in resentment and fear, and remained unhappily married for the rest of his life; rather than finding a reprieve among friends from an unhappy situation he could have attempted to brute-force his own will to override Melinda’s wishes and domineer her into satisfying his own expectations. Parts of each of these might well have actually happened, or things much darker and more serious than either, given the nature of the characters involved.
But this? The Daily Beast story? There simply isn’t anything *there*. We simply cannot infer anything with any degree of confidence at all, other than the bare facts I’ve already given too many words laying out. What we can do, and what you have done, is take general descriptions of entirely normal and healthy behaviour and conflate it with something sinister and condemnable simply because some no-talent hack got a cowardly rich person to feed them unremarkable claptrap. You can quote all the studies that you like saying this sort of behaviour has a useful social function, but I say the society for which it functions is a paltry and poor society indeed.
Gossip isn’t defined as perniciously spreading innuendo to enforce poorly-evolved and harmful social norms.
More to the point, though –
In this particular story, no, but there is the background information. There is what has been reported (by more serious sources than the Daily Beast) about Epstein and his friends. I don’t agree that that’s none of our business, given Bill Gates’s outsized influence in the world.