“I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” the Microsoft co-founder said

Bill Gates (left) and Jeffrey Epstein.Credit : Kevin Dietsch/Getty; Neil Rasmus/Patrick McMullan/Getty

Bill Gates this week admitted to having two affairs with Russian women while married to Melinda French Gates and apologized to staff at his charity for his past ties to sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — while maintaining he was not part of anything “illicit.”

“I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, 70, said in a town hall for his Gates Foundation on Tuesday, Feb. 24, according to a recording reviewed by the The Wall Street Journal.

A spokesperson for Gates tells PEOPLE in a statement that “this was a scheduled townhall with employees, which Bill does twice a year. In the conversation, Bill answered questions submitted by foundation staff on a range of issues, including the release of the Epstein files, the foundation’s work in AI, and the future of global health.”

“In the townhall, Bill spoke candidly, addressing several questions in detail, and took responsibility for his actions,” the spokesperson says.

Scrutiny has been renewed around Gates’ history with Epstein — who died in federal custody in 2019 after being accused of human trafficking — because a trove of documents released by the U.S. Justice Department showed yearsold draft emails Epstein wrote himself in which he accused Gates of contracting a sexually transmitted infection from “Russian girls” and then asking for Epstein’s help in order to hide it from his then-wife.

A spokesperson for Gates had previously called those claims from Epstein “absolutely absurd and completely false.”

However, Gates acknowledged on Tuesday, he’d had affairs with a “Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities.”

Epstein learned of these, he said. The “bridge player” was identified by the Journal in 2023 as Mila Antonova, who reportedly met Gates around 2010 when she was in her 20s.

SXSW/Getty; Hollie Adams/Bloomberg via Getty

Gates told his staff that he “never spent any time with victims, the women around [Epstein],” according to the Journal.

He also said it was a “huge mistake to spend time with Epstein” after first meeting the sex offender in 2011 — long after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution. He said they spent time together until 2014 but he never spent a night around Epstein or on one of his now infamous island properties.

“I apologize to other people who are drawn into this because of the mistake that I made,” he said.

Gates has previously said he was seeking charitable donations, reiterating as recently as earlier this month that “the focus was always he knew a lot of very rich people, and he was saying he could get them to give money to global health. In retrospect, that was a dead end.”

He said this week that he did not properly check Epstein’s background but was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel.

“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates said, according to the Journal.

During the town hall, Gates credited his ex — who split from him in 2021 and who recently spoke out herself and said he needed to “answer” for connections with Epstein — for being “skeptical” of the latter.

Gates ultimately said that his past with Epstein and the newly disclosed emails have cast a shadow over the foundation’s work and its reputation.

“It definitely is the opposite of the values of the foundation and the goals of the foundation,” he said. “And our work is very reputational sensitive. I mean, people can choose to work with us or not work with us.”