Brad Hunter
Originally Published on the Toronto Sun
Behind Gates’ nerdy personna was a partier allegedly known for throwing wild naked pool parties with strippers and always ready to play the field.
That was even after he married wife Melinda, according to a biography of the Microsoft founder.
James Wallace wrote in his 1997 biography on the tech mogul, Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace, that his hormone-charged hijinks were hidden by newspapers like The New York Times.
[“The Times] didn’t report on the wild bachelor parties that Microsoft’s boyish chairman would throw in his Seattle home, for which Gates 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,” Wallace wrote.
During his time at Harvard, Gates was also allegedly a frequent flier in Boston’s once notorious red-light district, the Combat Zone.
The long-forgotten biography says that Gates’ womanizing wasn’t curtailed when he began dating his future wife, then known as Melinda French in 1988.
“Being naked in a pool is no big deal,” his longtime friend and former Microsoft exec Vern Raburn told the Daily Mail.
“[But] there’s a difference between being naked in a pool with a whole bunch of other people, and being naked in a pool with somebody else, or in a bed with somebody else.”
Raburn added: “Certainly prior to their marriage, yeah — Bill liked to party. But I never saw any of that after the marriage.”
As Gates and his wife head to divorce court after 27 years of marriage, more alleged details are emerging about the squeaky clean Gates.
Among those details are his alleged friendship with disgraced sex trafficker billionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his arrangement with his wife for one weekend per year with former girlfriend Ann Winblad.
“He continued to play the field for a while, especially when he was out of town on business, when he would frequently hit on female journalists who covered Microsoft and the company industry,” Wallace wrote.
“His womanizing was well known, although not well reported” and his wife “was well aware of Gates’s womanizing.”
And Gates was reluctant to commit causing the pair to break up for a year.
“When they got back together again in 1992, however, the relationship grew closer and stronger,” he wrote.
Winblad described Melinda in the book as “an exceptional woman.”
