Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told a House committee that he "should have never met" Jeffrey Epstein as he faced a new grilling in Congress.
In his opening statement before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Gates claimed that "based on what I know now, I understand that even if he had delivered the new donors he promised" to the Gates foundation it "would not have justified associating with him."
"At the outset, I want to state very clearly: I never witnessed nor had any indication that Epstein was engaged in ongoing criminal conduct," Gates added, noting that he "ever went to his island, his ranch, or his Florida home."
Gates also told press before the grilling that he holed his "testimony is helpful to the important work of the committee to find justice for the victims."
Gates has been repeatedly asked about his ties with Epstein. He has said he had dinner with him on several occasions in hopes of making him part of a project to build a network of investors for global health initiatives.
"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," Gates told an Australian outlet earlier this year.
He went on to reference an alleged email that Epstein sent to himself claiming Gates got a sexually-transmitted disease and asked for antibiotics to surreptitiously give to his then-wife Melinda.
"Apparently, Jeffrey wrote an email to himself. Ah, that email was never sent. The email is false," Gates said. "So, I don't know what his thinking was there. It just reminds me that every minute I spent with him, I regret, and I apologize I did that," he added.
Gates' testimony on Wednesday comes a day after his longtime executive assistant, Lesley Groff, was questioned by the committee.
Another testimony that made headlines was that of Sarah Kellen, a longtime assistant of Epstein, who has for years been accused by some survivors of helping facilitate his abuse. She told the committee that she was also one of his victims and that he sexually and psychologically abused her for more than a decade.
"(Epstein) groomed me, sexually and psychologically abused me, controlled me, manipulated me, dominated me, and gaslit me, until I could no longer tell which thoughts were mine, and which were his," she said in her opening statement.
