The Epstein files

Reports of Bill Gates’ connections with Jeffrey Epstein grow more lurid with each dump of documents from the Department of Justice. The latest includes somewhat confusing emails that Epstein may have been drafting on behalf of someone named Boris, who worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The messages claim that Bill contracted an STD and wanted to “surreptitiously” give Melinda antibiotics. It also claims that Bill had “trysts” with married women and “Russian girls.”

In a statement to Business Insider, a spokesperson for Bill Gates said:

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Would it surprise you to learn Microsoft booted Jeffrey Epstein from its online gaming platform? As spotted by XboxEra, the latest batch of Epstein’s emails shows that in December 2013, he was “permanently suspended due to harassment, threats, and/or abuse of other players.”

But it appears the real reason may be simpler: A second email from Microsoft to Epstein the very same day shows he was banned because he was a registered sex offender, and because Microsoft was among the companies that agreed to purge registered sex offenders from their systems.

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The Justice Department has blamed its delayed release of some so-called Epstein files on needing more time to redact sensitive information, like details identifying the victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But at least some of the redactions so far released appear to mistakenly disclose information meant to be obscured from the public.

A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Epstein’s estate was posted to the “Epstein Library” on the DOJ website with several redactions throughout, Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, among others, shared on platforms like Bluesky. But simply copying and pasting many of the redactions into a new document reveals what’s beneath the black boxes. This method uncovers details like that one of the co-executors allegedly signed over $400,000 in checks from Epstein’s foundation “payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model.” It also reveals that a co-executor had allegedly signed a foundation check with the former model’s last name in the memo line to an immigration lawyer “who was involved in one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein’s victims to secure a victim’s immigration status.” It also uncovers details about one alleged victim in the complaint.

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On December 11th, 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was fretting about what came up if you Googled him. By this time Epstein had already pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution with a child and was a registered sex offender, and just a few days earlier he had been photographed in Central Park taking a stroll with Prince Andrew.

Epstein emailed an associate to complain. “the google page is not good,” Epstein wrote, according to documents released last week by the House Oversight Committee. He also took issue with tens of thousands of dollars of payments, which appear to have been made to “clean up” results. “I have yet to have a complete breakdown of payments. and the results , are what they are.”

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While the summer doldrums have hit Washington, the MAGA influencers can never truly go on vacation, especially if they’ve spent their careers promising to reveal the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. Although their politicians are now in power, they’re getting stonewalled, and in the absence of juicy “Epstein files” to feed to their audiences, a new maelstrom of discontent is brewing, one that implicates much more than allegations about a pedophile’s sex trafficking ring. The complex rift around Donald Trump’s loyalists and the diehard Epstein truthers can no longer be separated from the issue of Israel, and as days pass, vocal criticism of the Israeli government is becoming louder and louder inside the American right wing — something that was once unthinkable.

It should be emphasized that some of the most anti-Israel voices on the right are simply open antisemites, and that’s using the word in the narrowest possible sense. (For example, white nationalist Nick Fuentes has espoused Holocaust denial and praised Hitler.) It is also true, however, that Israel is currently engaged in an internationally unpopular asymmetric war in Gaza, and that there is an outstanding arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.

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On July 12th, the political world experienced an unprecedented phenomenon: President Donald Trump got ratioed on his own social media platform, and it was on a post about Jeffrey Epstein — someone who, according to Trump, “nobody cares about.”

Clearly, his followers on Truth Social disagreed. As of today, this post has 43.2k likes, 13.7k ReTruths, and 48K comments, nearly all of which express fury about the information — or lack thereof — that the Trump administration has provided about the well-connected billionaire, who died in prison shortly after being arrested for alleged sex trafficking of minors. Last week, after months of promises to release more information about the Epstein investigation, the Department of Justice and FBI released a joint memo, stating that there was no list of high-powered “clients” who joined Epstein in his activities, no evidence that Epstein blackmailed anybody, and that Epstein did actually die by suicide.

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Money and power are clarifying agents: they tell you who people are. Jeffrey Epstein liked to describe himself as a “science philanthropist,” and academics liked to take his money. Among them was Joichi Ito, who stepped down on September 7th as the head of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab, where a host of tech products were developed, including the E Ink used in Amazon’s Kindle and Guitar Hero.

Ito resigned following an investigation by The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, which showed that Ito accepted more money from Epstein than he’d previously disclosed and that he went to great lengths to conceal the source of that money.

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A victim of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein testified that she was forced to have sex with MIT professor Marvin Minsky, as revealed in a newly unsealed deposition. Epstein was registered as a sex offender in 2008 as part of a controversial plea deal. More recently, he was arrested on charges of sex trafficking amid a flood of new allegations.

Minsky, who died in 2016, was known as an associate of Epstein, but this is the first direct accusation implicating the AI pioneer in Epstein’s broader sex trafficking network. The deposition also names Prince Andrew of Britain and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, among others.

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Jeffrey Epstein’s presence has loomed large over the scientific community for several decades. To some of the most high-profile scientists around the world, Epstein was a generous benefactor, a strong supporter of their research, and even a personal friend. He’s also a convicted sex offender, who was recently arrested and charged with allegedly sex trafficking young girls in New York. The Verge reached out to over a dozen different scientists and institutions who have been publicly linked to Epstein, with questions about their history with the multimillionaire and their reactions to his recent arrest. Some have themselves been accused of sexual harassment and assault. Only a handful chose to respond. Epstein’s lawyers also did not respond to a request for comment.

As other outlets, including BuzzFeed News and WBUR reported, Epstein and the charities he controlled poured millions into research and institutions, and he frequently touted his friendships with research heavyweights. Epstein’s history with the scientific community shows a man eager to ingratiate himself neatly into a scene dominated by white male thinkers hailing from the most elite institutions around the world. He never possessed a scientific degree (his closest professional foray into science was as a physics and calculus high school teacher), but his interest and investments in science seem far from cursory — one could easily get the impression Epstein might have wanted to be a scientist in a different life.

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