Bill Gates believed Jeffrey Epstein could deliver the Nobel Prize he craved. Instead, their toxic dalliance destroyed Gates' marriage and stained his 'saintly' reputation for ever... as revealed in a

One was a charming and urbane New York financier around whom beautiful young women hovered like bees to honey. An unflattering new biography of Gates, right, offers fresh insight into his troubling four-year friendship with the late, disgraced millionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, left Das, the former finance editor of the New York Times – so hardly a hack operator – says in the book that it was this lofty dream that paedophile Epstein exploited in order to 'tunnel his way into the philanthropist's orbit' and establish a toxic collaboration that would eventually destroy Gates's 27-year marriage to his long-suffering wife Melinda. She filed for divorce in 2021 Epstein regarded Gates – then the world's richest man and still worth an estimated £100 billion – as the 'brightest star' in his 'dark universe', Das says. Gates agreed and in January 2011 he met Epstein at the financier's imposing seven-floor Upper East Side mansion – reportedly the biggest private residence in New York. Epstein reportedly tried to blackmail Gates about an alleged 2010 affair he had with 20- something Mila Antonova, a Russian bridge player It was a decision that displayed a 'surprising' lack of judgment, Das claims, given the warnings he'd had from Melinda and from the 'media battalions' at his foundation and business empire 'who are paid to maintain the philanthropist's upstanding public profile and brief him on the backgrounds and expertise of the people he meets'.