Melinda Gates opens up about ‘unbelievably painful’ divorce from Bill Gates

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The floodgates have opened for Melinda French Gates.

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In a new interview, the 58-year-old philanthropist revealed that she needed to end her marriage to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

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“I had some reasons I just couldn’t stay in that marriage anymore,” French Gates told Fortune. “But the odd thing about COVID is that it gave me the privacy to do what I needed to do.”

She elaborated: “It’s unbelievably painful, in innumerable ways, but I had the privacy to get through it.”

The couple filed for divorce in May 2021 after 27 years of marriage. Prior to it being finalized three months later, Gates confessed to having an affair with an employee in 2000 that ended amicably.

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For French Gates, their children — Jennifer, 25, Rory, 23, and Phoebe, 19 — were her top priorities during the split.

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“My main concern, of course, was trying to protect my kids through it,” she told the magazine. “And we got to the other side.”

French Gates says their Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which they founded in 2000 and continue to run together, helped her deal with her emotions while in the process of divorcing.

“I kept working with the person I was moving away from, and I needed to show up and be my best self every single day,” she said. “So even though I might be crying at 9 a.m. and then have to be on a video conference at 10 a.m. with the person I’m leaving, I have to show up and be my best.”

French Gates added, “I learned as a leader that I could do it. It reminded me that the foundation calls me to be my best.”

In an interview with CBS Mornings earlier this year, she told Gayle King that she shed “a lot of tears for many days” and felt like she was “grieving a loss” following the divorce.