Melinda French Gates has opened up about her decision to divorce her longtime husband, Bill Gates, after 27 years of marriage.
The 60-year-old philanthropist revealed that despite the high stakes the divorce had brought about, her decision ultimately came from a personal place.
“When that voice would come — and it would come at different times because of things that had happened outside the marriage that I would later come to learn about — I kept pushing it away,” French Gates said on the “How to Fail with Elizabeth Day” podcast Wednesday.
She admitted to feeling pressure to maintain the relationship for their three children and their joint philanthropic venture, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“We had a foundation and that was big and I believed in that work. I still believe in the work of the foundation,” she said, adding that her inner voice eventually became too loud to ignore.
“At some point I had to turn towards it, and I just knew it and I knew it in my soul,” she explained.
French Gates added that it took her a long time to conclude that her marriage to the Microsoft co-founder was beyond repair.
“I took marriage — and I still do — very, very seriously and it wasn’t just two of us involved, it was five of us,” she said, referring to the pair’s kids Jennifer, 28, Rory, 25, and Phoebe, 22.
The exes met in 1987 during a Microsoft sales meeting when Melinda was a product manager and Bill was the company’s CEO.
After he reportedly asked her out on a date in a parking lot, the pair’s romance blossomed and saw them tie the knot on New Year’s Day 1994.
The pair announced their divorce in 2021 after secretly separating the year before, saying they could no longer “grow together as a couple in this next phase of life.”
The following year, Bill admitted that he “caused pain” to his family when “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie asked the tech leader if infidelity played a role in the divorce.
That same year, Melinda went on “CBS Mornings” and hinted that her then-husband’s working relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was also a factor in their split.
“I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” Melinda said at the time. “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified.”
Following their split, the pair have since moved on romantically, with Melinda finding love with her entrepreneur boyfriend, Philip Vaughn.
Bill, for his part, kickstarted a relationship with Paula Hurd, a former tech executive at NCR Global and widow of Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, in 2023.
