Hey Everyone,
Julie K. Brown joined me yesterday to discuss yesterday’s congressional testimony from Bill Gates, as well as that of longtime Epstein associates Sarah Kellen and Lesley Groff. (Groff testified on Tuesday and Kellen testified on May 21st).
We don’t yet have transcripts for Groff and Gates but we do know that Gates told congress that Epstein had knowledge of his extra-marital affairs and tried to leverage that to re-engage with him, after Gates had decided Epstein could not be useful in helping him scale his philanthropy and dropped him in 2014. Gates said Epstein’s efforts at re-engagement were unsuccessful. Still, it’s the first time someone has raised Epstein’s predilection for attempted blackmail to Congress; a reminder, as Julie points out, that if Epstein was a threat to someone like Gates, then of course his vulnerable female victims stood no chance.
What I hope the transcript will show is exactly how Epstein gained knowledge of Gates’ private life. Based on my own reporting - and that of the Wall Street Journal - a key conduit between Epstein and Gates was the mysterious figure of Melanie Walker, a neurology professor and an Epstein protege who met Epstein with Donald Trump over tea at the Plaza hotel in the 1990s. Walker was fresh out of college and was thinking about a modeling career at the time, but Epstein encouraged her to pursue medicine instead. While she attended medical school she listed an address in the New York building on East 66th street where Epstein housed many other women who “worked” for him. He told people that Walker was his “science advisor”.
Years later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walker wound up having a sexual relationship with Gates in 2017, while taking all sorts of direction from Epstein, according to text messages now unearthed by the Gates Foundation, which is conducting an investigation into Gates relationship with Epstein.
The text messages illustrate Epstein’s longterm tight control over Walker who was first sent - at Epstein’s direction- into Gates’ orbit in 2001 - right around the time her relationship with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was ending. (She had been introduced to the British prince by Ghislaine Maxwell).
Andrew was also at the dinner where Walker sat next to Steven Sinofsky, the number three at Microsoft. Walker moved in with Sinofsky soon afterwards. Sinofksy grew sufficiently close to Epstein that Epstein wound up advising him on his exit from Microsoft in 2012, according to Justice Department records.
While living with Sinofsky Walker began working at the Gates Foundation in 2006. In 2009 she encouraged Boris Nikolic, an immunologist who was close to Gates, to meet with Epstein (Nikolic has said he had never heard of Epstein at the time. ) This was right Epstein had served a year in jail for soliciting sex with a minor and was looking to rehabilitate his image. Walker also talked up Epstein to Gates himself, according to text messages reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Gates and Epstein met in 2011 - but Gates dropped Epstein in 2014 once it became clear Epstein was not able to deliver on promises to help him scale his philanthropy. Epstein was livid that he had been dumped, according to my sources. But Walker was in a prime position to keep whispering in Gates’ ear: in 2017 she moved jobs to work at Bill Gates’ private office. She began a sexual relationship with Gates the same year.
“Correspondence between Epstein and Walker reveals that Epstein was actively encouraging Walker to pursue a sexual relationship with Gates,” a Gates spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
David Fleissig, a lawyer for Walker told the Wall Street Journal that Walker was “a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein” who had a prior history of abuse and then endured “a coercive relationship that spanned decades and ended only with his death. Beyond that, she would prefer not to make any comment at this time.”
Walker has not alleged sexual abuse by Epstein and hasn’t filed claims against his estate.
But it appears that there was a wobble in her relationship with Epstein in August 2014. According to the Wall Street Journal she wrote to Gates that Epstein, had “pretty incredible human specimens” at his disposal, but warned of consequences that she had seen “happen to too many powerful people over the years.” She also noted that Epstein tries to appeal to the “weaknesses or proclivities” of his targets.
Yet by 2017 she was back seeing advice from Epstein on text message as to how to handle Gates. She continued writing effusively to Epstein until the 2019 - the year of his arrest and death.
A spokesperson for Gates told the Wall Street Journal he had no idea of Walker’s relationship with Epstein and their “shared motives”.
Rep. Robert Garcia said yesterday that the House Oversight Committee wants to interview people Gates mentioned in his testimony. I sincerely hope Melanie Walker is one of them. At the very least, it’s clear from the text messages she knows how Epstein attempted to blackmail rich and powerful men - and who those men were: a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is missing from public view at the current moment.
Also, it’s worth asking: why do know so little about Walker? Why is she not in the Epstein Files, given how long and close her relationship to Epstein was? According to her lawyer, he asked her name be withheld on the basis that Epstein had introduced her to two professional contacts whom she rebuffed after they sexually propositioned her.
Hmm. Does this really make her a “victim”? Your thoughts?
Julie and I move on to discussing the testimony of someone we do think was a victim: Sarah Kellen - a former employee of Epstein’s who was listed in the infamous Non Prosecution Agreement of 2008.
Julie and I agreed that, after reading the transcript of her testimony it was very hard to dispute that Kellen was a victim. She had grown up a Jehovah’s Witness. She was effectively homeless by the time she began working for Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Her descriptions of working for Epstein were hard to read.
Even when she finally got out of Epstein’s household she was not a free agent. Epstein negotiated the one-sided prenuptial agreement she signed to marry the racing car driver Brian Vickers, from whom she is now divorced. She was essentially handed like a chattel from one rich man to another.
We believe that Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime assistant, is in a different category altogether.
“She knew. She absolutely knew,” Julie says in our conversation.
I agree. Groff maintained to Congress that she never saw any instances of improper behavior by Epstein. Well as Julie points out, you don’t need to see anything to be aware something is off. When a guy asks you to book him three massages a day - I’d argue it’s pretty clear that something is off.
I remember when Groff phoned me in the Fall of 2022 after I’d met with Epstein, and she said “Jeffrey wanted me to tell you: he thought you were so pretty.”
Eew. It was inappropriate then. It’s inappropriate now.
It told me that, even if she didn’t witness specifics, Lesley Groff knew, in general, exactly who her boss was.
We also discussed Julie’s recent interview with Michael Reiter, the former Palm Beach police chief who helped build the original case against Epstein.
Reiter was reluctant to be interviewed for almost twenty years partly because he believed - based on what happened to me and to my late colleague at Vanity Fair, John Connolly - that Epstein would get any interview killed.
One of Reiter’s greatest frustrations is the misconception that local law enforcement failed to act. As Julie points out, Reiter and his detectives “were standing alone” in trying to hold Epstein accountable in 2006 and 2007. They built the case. The decision not to fully prosecute Epstein came later and elsewhere.
You can read that interview here.
Finally, we get to yesterday’s sizzling New York Times read about the panic inside the White House Situation Room around the Epstein Files and the great effort - in vain - to stop their release.
This read to me like a Feydeau farce: a tale of bumbling incompetence among the Trump top lieutenants that would be hilarious if at the heart of it there wasn’t such a serious problem, an omission if you will: No one in the self-selected “spin room” asked the most fundamental question of all: What was it, they were meant to be spinning, or covering-up or distracting from? Why was President Trump so averse to releasing the Epstein Files? (I have always struggled with this question, given that, based on the incomplete record we have, there’s nothing in there that’s criminally problematic for Trump. So what was his objection to them? It doesn’t make much sense.)
I tried to explain this last night on MsNOw.
The Times story describes a mass panic to cover up…. what, exactly? None of the panickers seems to wonder.
No one thought to go into see their boss and ask: “What is it in the Epstein Files you don’t want out there?”
No one thought to have a conversation along the lines of: “Isn’t the Epstein story completely horrific? Don’t we want to understand what happened? Doesn’t America need to know? Might that not be a good political strategy, even?”
The kindest thing one can say is that, based on the scenes in the New York Times, this bunch of senior political operatives is not only chaotic, dumb and ineffective, they are cowards, as well as being the least curious people on the planet.
Thank you LeftieProf, Sandra Tuttle, Donna Everett, Sandy Homuth, Kerry Shaw, and many others for tuning into my live video with Julie k Brown! Join me for my next live video in the app.
