In a 2021 CBS interview in which she admitted her husband's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had contributed to the end of their 27-year marriage, Melinda French Gates gave a cryptic reply when quizzed about claims that Bill Gates had been serially unfaithful to her.

'Those are questions Bill needs to answer,' she told interviewer Gayle King, in the process making clear such rumors were hardly wide of the mark. After all, their divorce papers reportedly referenced more than 20 affairs he'd had.

And now, after years of defensiveness about his private life, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder is indeed answering those 'questions.'

Testifying to US Congress as part of an inquiry into Epstein, Gates named three women with whom he'd had extramarital affairs and who were also connected to the pedophile financier. In fact there may actually be four, but more of that later.

Gates told the House oversight committee that he had affairs with two Russian women, naming them as Mila Antonova, a bridge player, and Karima Nigmatulina, a nuclear physicist. At the time, one was in her 20s and the other in her 30s, he said.

The philanthropist, once the world's richest person, also admitted to a third affair with Dr Alice Jacobs Nesselrodt, a Harvard-trained medical entrepreneur, during lengthy testimony on June 10 which has just been published. Gates said the affair started some time before 2010.

Two of the three women, it has been noted, bear a striking resemblance to the wife on whom he was cheating - albeit they are significantly younger.

Gates claimed he came clean to his Melinda about the Russian affairs in spring 2013, having already admitted the relationship with Dr Nesselrodt some time earlier. Asked if he thought they were relevant to her decision to divorce him in 2021, he replied: 'You would have to ask her, but I imagine that they were, yes.'

Gates, now 70, also told the committee he 'may have been in the presence of victims' while meeting Epstein but denied any sexual misconduct. (A Gates spokesman has admitted it was a 'mistake' for Gates to ever meet Epstein but denied he was ever involved in any illegal activities with the pedophile financier).

Gates, who was testifying under oath, told the committee that Epstein later discovered the two affairs with the Russian women and suggested that the disgraced financier had 'contemplated blackmailing me.'

He testified that he was not blackmailed but 'as you look at these emails, you know, it looks like Mr Epstein's brainstorming was going in that direction.'

Gates also admitted he had other extramarital affairs but none that had any connection with Epstein.

He denied claims, contained in emails released in the Justice Department's Epstein files, that one of the Russian women had given him a sexually transmitted disease and that he'd asked Epstein to help him get hold of antibiotics he could surreptitiously administer to his wife.

At times, the hearing was all very grubby stuff.

Some will look at Gates and the benign, almost asexual image he and his aides have long sought to project - the bespectacled and cerebral nerd with a penchant for neutral-tone V-neck sweaters and doing good in the world - and dismiss out of hand the idea of him as a hot-blooded womanizer.

After all, this was the man who, as the head of the $89 billion Gates Foundation which has battled to fight global poverty and infectious diseases, was voted the world's most admired man in 2019 - above even the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis.

However, allegations have circulated for nearly three decades that Gates was not all he seemed.

And so, when it first emerged that he had dealings with Epstein, many in the tech world - especially those who'd worked for Microsoft - were not exactly shocked.

Gates married Melinda French, one of his Microsoft employees, in 1994 and they would have three children together.

However, his image as a squeaky-clean - if a little boring - family guy was soon being publicly challenged.

In a 1997 book, Overdrive: Bill Gates And The Race To Control Cyberspace, writer James Wallace described how as a student at Harvard, Gates had liked to 'frequent Boston's notorious Combat Zone, with its porn shows, strip joints and prostitutes.'

After he dropped out and returned to Seattle, his home city, to set up Microsoft, Gates would throw 'wild bachelor parties' at his home 'for which [he] would visit one of Seattle's all-nude nightclubs and hire dancers to come to his home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool,' wrote Wallace.

Wallace claimed the media ignored Gates's tawdry behavior because Microsoft 'spoon-fed' them stories.

He may have liked once to entertain his colleagues with strippers but Gates's personal taste has - as his congressional testimony confirms - been for more obviously brainy women.

Gates met Melinda, a Microsoft product developer, in 1987 but - according to Wallace - his 'womanizing' threatened their relationship before they were married as he continued to 'play the field for a while, especially when he was out of town on business.'

A year after Wallace's bombshell tome came out, Gates faced more accusations in another book, 1998's The Microsoft File. Its author, veteran tech writer Wendy Goldman Rohm, claimed that Melinda hadn't been the first Microsoft underling to catch Gates's eye.

Rohm interviewed German-born Stefanie Reichel, who said she'd had a torrid seven-month affair with her overall boss, after they met at a company meeting in Monte Carlo in April 1992. Gates was 37 and she was 25.

(Microsoft dismissed the book - published by Random House after what Rohm described as exhaustive fact-checking - saying: 'This should be filed in the fiction section of bookstores.')

Rohm alleged that after their meeting Gates had immediately emailed her to say that seeing her had 'energized' him, admitting he was 'somewhat shy' and adding gauchely: 'I hope I didn't stare or anything.'

He then reportedly 'bombarded' her with emails and love letters, and they met in San Francisco and in Seattle where they would stay in the gatekeeper's lodge of his huge estate.

He also took her with him to London, according to the book, seating her next to him at a dinner at the grand country hotel Cliveden House, where Microsoft was holding a board meeting.

Ms Reichel told Rohm she was 'uncomfortable' in the relationship and told Gates - on a rendezvous in Amsterdam during which he insisted on taking her to the famous red-light district - that she wanted to end their relationship.

He was upset and tried to change her mind, recalled Ms Reichel who later complained about Gates's fumbling love-making skills and his awful personal hygiene. She said she had agreed to have a romantic relationship because she was worried about losing her job.

It remains unclear whether Melinda - who was dating Gates at the time but not yet married to him - knew about her purported rival. The two women appeared to know each other as in 1993, Ms Reichel was a guest at a costume party to celebrate Bill and Melinda's engagement.

The party was also attended by another Gates flame who had a truly bizarre relationship with the Microsoft boss.

Ann Winblad, a super-intelligent venture capitalist, had dated Gates from 1984 to 1987 but they remained friends and were so close that he sought her advice on whether to propose to Melinda.

Even after he married, Gates kept a framed photo of Ms Winblad alongside one of Melinda in his office and insisted his wife to allow him to spend a long weekend every year alone with Ms Winblad at her North Carolina beach cottage. 'We can play putt-putt while discussing biotechnology,' he told a biographer. Surprisingly, Melinda agreed to this strange arrangement.

Not that she tolerated all his behavior. Insiders claimed she set the wheels in motion for their 2021 divorce two years earlier when she consulted lawyers. 'Being around them was like arriving at a summit,' recalled a friend of Gates in describing their frosty body language with each other in the final days of their marriage.

Gates denied many of the reports of his philandering but admitted he had an extramarital affair with an employee two decades earlier which Microsoft's board investigated after the unnamed software engineer alerted the company in 2019.

According to a 2021 report in the New York Times, he pursued other women at Microsoft and at the Gates's philanthropic foundation.

While his approaches were not predatory, some staff disapproved, said the newspaper.

He allegedly emailed one woman to ask her out for dinner, adding: 'If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened.'

He said to another at a drinks party: 'I want to see you. Will you have dinner with me?'

A Gates spokesman told the Times: 'It is extremely disappointing that there have been so many untruths published about the cause, the circumstances and the timeline of Bill Gates's divorce.'

The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft board members decided Gates needed to step down in 2020 after judging that the in-house affair brought to their attention the previous year had been 'inappropriate'. His spokesman insisted it ended 'amicably' and had nothing to do with his departure from the board.

The same newspaper revealed Gates's affair with Russian bridge player Mila Antonova in 2023, reporting that they had first met around 2010 when she was in her 20s. She claimed in a video posted online that they met at a bridge tournament as Gates is another enthusiast of the card game. 'I didn't beat him, but I tried to kick him with my leg,' she said.

The Russian met Epstein in 2013, when she tried to persuade him to fund her idea for a website that taught people bridge, and he paid for her to attend software coding school, later reportedly asking Gates to remunerate him.

Ms Antonova was hardly the only woman who knew both Gates and Epstein. Dr Melanie Walker, a brain surgeon, worked for the Gates Foundation and Gates's private office for more than a decade. But she was also very close to Epstein who was her longtime mentor and confidante. Dr Walker's lawyer has called her a 'survivor of Epstein' with whom she had a 'coercive relationship.'

Curiously, although Gates told Congress that Antonova, Nigmatulina and Jacobs Nesselrodt were the only women he had affairs with who were connected to Epstein, there may in fact have been four as he reportedly also had one with Walker.

The Wall Street Journal reported this month that, by 2017, Walker's relationship with Gates had turned sexual. A Gates spokesman described the affair as 'consensual' and claimed Epstein had been encouraging her to pursue a sexual relationship with the tech icon.

In 2024, Gates's reputation received a further blow with a book by business writer Anupreeta Das, the former finance editor of the New York Times, which claimed that Epstein's 'larger-than-life behavior was an adventure for Gates.'

In 'Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King: Bill Gates And His Quest To Shape Our World', the writer reported that Gates chafed at his own over-scheduled and conventional life with Melinda and their three children.

He reportedly told a colleague in 2011 that Epstein's 'lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.'

Das claimed Gates was notorious for hitting on young women at Microsoft although his approaches were 'clumsy rather than predatory' and often based on his misinterpreting their interest in him.

Das claimed the notoriously 'flirty' Gates was 'like a kid in a candy store' with pretty young Microsoft interns.

A Gates spokesman claimed the Das book relied 'almost exclusively on second and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources' and included 'highly sensationalized allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts Mr Gates's office provided to the author on numerous occasions.'

The Daily Mail has reached out to Gates for comment.

Das reported a former Microsoft executive telling her that Gates is 'not Harvey Weinstein,' while someone who saw some of his 'flirtatious emails' described them as 'cringeworthy.'

However, by the time Melinda filed for divorce in 2021, she had long been 'seething' about his infidelity and 'about the unequal nature of her marriage to a man heralded globally as a technology genius and trailblazing philanthropist,' wrote Das.

After the Epstein files were released, Melinda told NPR: 'It brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage.'

By all accounts, she had to put up with a world of heartache before she finally called time on their union.