By Khadeeja Safdar and Joshua Chaffin
It was September 2017, and Dr. Melanie Walker's work with Bill Gates was coming to an end.
For more than a decade, Walker had worked at the Gates Foundation and then the billionaire's private office. By the summer of 2017, the relationship between Walker and Gates had turned sexual, according to people familiar with the matter. Walker was planning her exit.
She turned to one of her closest confidants -- a mentor who had supported her and advised her for nearly three decades: Jeffrey Epstein.
"With bg. All you would have to say, is you should know that I've told jeffrey everything -- everything," Epstein wrote in a text message. Walker replied that she was "worried he will immediately retaliate against me."
When Gates appears before Congress this week, he will have to answer questions about such exchanges from the Justice Department's release of Epstein files. The mysterious role played by Walker, who kept close ties with both men, will come under scrutiny for the first time.
The Seattle doctor is one of the many technicolor characters who populated Epstein's universe. She has claimed to have been introduced to Epstein by Donald Trump in the 1990s. She struck up a close relationship with Britain's Prince Andrew and was a longtime partner of Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive, who himself had ties to Epstein.
Yet she may have been most consequential as one of the people who helped Epstein ingratiate himself in Gates's world after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. She did so from her perch at the Microsoft co-founder's charitable foundation and then his private office.
The Gates Foundation has launched its own probe into its Epstein ties that is being handled by the law firm WilmerHale, according to people familiar with the probe. Those investigators have asked about Walker and the nature of her relationship with Gates.
Compared with other Epstein associates, Walker, now 54 and a professor at UW Medicine, has largely remained off the public radar, though her name and some of her messages from the Epstein files have surfaced in media reports.
Her low profile has been maintained, in part, with the help of her lawyer who requested that the Justice Department redact her name in its files. She didn't allege sexual abuse by Epstein and hasn't filed claims against his estate; her lawyer 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.
While her name is hidden, people familiar with the matter have identified her correspondence and described her interactions with Gates and Epstein. Over time, Walker's relationship with Gates and his former wife, Melinda French Gates, would become fraught, the documents show. Yet she appeared to be loyal to Epstein, a longtime friend and benefactor, right until his 2019 death.
In a statement, Walker's lawyer, David Fleissig, called her "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."
A spokesperson for Gates said he "was not aware of the nature of the relationship between Walker and Epstein, their shared motives, or the details of their history together."
"Correspondence between Epstein and Walker reveals that Epstein was actively encouraging Walker to pursue a sexual relationship with Gates," the Gates spokesperson said.
In the summer of 2017, Walker confided in Epstein about encounters she'd had with Gates. By then she had left the foundation but remained on a short-term consulting contract at his private office, where she was pitching ideas for Gates to back. She left the private office later that year.
"The relationship between Walker and Gates was consensual and ended amicably," the spokesperson said. "Walker continued to reach out to Gates periodically for years after."
Gates has publicly expressed regret for his dealings with Epstein, which he has said were a mistake and didn't involve illicit conduct. "Gates has never had an improper relationship with any employee of the Gates Foundation or Gates Ventures, and no complaint alleging otherwise has ever been made," the Gates spokesperson added.
Great admiration
Melanie Starnes, as she was then known, grew up in Laredo, Texas, as the daughter of an Air Force veteran. Walker has told several people she met Epstein and Trump at the Plaza Hotel in the early 1990s after graduating with honors from the University of Texas. (In a 2018 email introducing a neurosurgeon to Epstein, she wrote: "I've known Jeffrey 28 years and this isn't a joke -- Donald Trump introduced us.")
At first, Epstein and Walker discussed the possibility of Victoria's Secret modeling. But, as they chatted, he changed tack, according to what Walker told people. Forget modeling, he advised her. She should instead pursue medical school.
She did, and they kept in touch. Records show she listed an address in a New York apartment building at 301 East 66th Street, the same building where Epstein controlled multiple units in which he housed associates and victims. Epstein also made her his "science adviser."
Walker developed a relationship with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then known as Prince Andrew, after an introduction from Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime associate. In a 2003 interview, Walker gave Mail on Sunday a flavor of their relationship, telling the British tabloid that the then-prince called her "Mel," "Dork" and "smarty pants," and that they mostly talked about science and medicine.
By the early 2000s, she was living with Sinofsky, then a top Microsoft executive, in Seattle after meeting him at a tech dinner that was also attended by Prince Andrew, and in 2006, Walker started working for the Gates Foundation. At the time, it was more akin to a fast-growing startup than the global health behemoth it is today.
It was at the foundation that she befriended Boris Nikolic, a Harvard-trained immunologist who was Gates's chief science adviser. In 2009, after she learned that Nikolic was moving to a role at Gates's private office, she took him to lunch and delivered what amounted to a pitch for Epstein, according to Nikolic. "I had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein before this point," he told The Wall Street Journal.
During lunch, Walker lauded Epstein as the man who put her on the path to medicine, he said, and played down his 2008 conviction. Nikolic said he first met Epstein that December.
In an October 2009 email to Epstein, she pitched Epstein on having her run his foundation and told him that Nikolic was moving to work with Gates full time, which she described as confidential information. "He will want to know if he can trust you and how much he can tell you," she wrote of Nikolic. "I guess it just takes time."
Years later, Epstein would help Nikolic negotiate his 2013 separation from Gates's private office. (It was a service that Epstein provided for Sinofsky, too, when he left Microsoft in 2012, the Justice Department files show.) A spokesman for Sinofsky declined to comment. Nikolic, who exchanged hundreds of messages with Epstein, said he deeply regrets his interactions with Epstein and that he was a "master manipulator."
There are other indications in the Justice Department files of Walker vouching for Epstein to people in the Gates Foundation community. In September 2010, for example, she emailed Alex Friedman, who had recently left as the foundation's chief financial officer, praising Epstein and joking that she could attest to "a full 20 years of bad behavior on" Epstein's part. Friedman replied, noting he had heard Walker speak of Epstein "always with great admiration."
Friedman told the Journal he had never heard of Epstein before Walker mentioned him, and took her remark in the email as a "tongue-in-cheek reference" to someone she had long known.
Very discreet
For Epstein, Gates was the ultimate prize. Access to one of the world's richest men, with his deep-pocketed foundation and unmatched convening power in global health, would have lent Epstein the legitimacy he was seeking after his 2008 conviction.
In January 2011, Epstein was planning to meet with Gates. Before the meeting, Walker emailed Gates to prepare him, calling Epstein "one of my closest friends." She discussed his views on global poverty and credited Epstein with her decision to attend medical school.
She relayed Epstein's personal philosophy as "only do what makes you happy." She added: "The world's most gorgeous people hang around Jeffrey. He's very discreet. Just sayin..."
Gates has said he met multiple times with Epstein from 2011 to 2014, including at his New York townhouse, to discuss philanthropy. Epstein sought unsuccessfully to convince Gates to establish a global donor fund with JPMorgan and discovered some of the billionaire's extramarital affairs.
Around 2013, Walker left the Gates Foundation and moved to the World Bank through a secondment, meaning the foundation continued to pay her salary. She became senior adviser to President Jim Yong Kim.
In August 2014, Walker sent Gates what appeared to be a warning about Epstein: Gates should maintain "a healthy distance for anything of a personal nature" when dealing with Epstein.
Epstein, she wrote, 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.
As Epstein tried to make headway with Gates, he struggled with the Microsoft co-founder's wife, who -- after one evening at the Manhattan townhouse -- said she never wanted to see him again. Walker also appeared to arouse the froideur of French Gates, who was the foundation's co-chair.
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June 07, 2026 22:02 ET (02:02 GMT)
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