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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsMelinda French Gates described divorce as painful and said she would not wish it on any family. In a March 2025 interview with ELLE, she also said she was “thriving on the other side of a divorce.” She called leaving her marriage one of the hardest and most important things she had done.
What Melinda French Gates said about the divorce
Asked in the March 2025 ELLE interview what she hoped someone would find about her five years later, French Gates answered: “She’s thriving on the other side of a divorce.” She then emphasized: “Just thriving.” Her comments paired an honest acknowledgment of the pain with a description of how she wanted to be understood beyond the breakup.
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Moment of Lift | $10.31 | Buy on Amazon |
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The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward | $11.27 | Buy on Amazon |
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“Look, divorces are painful, and it’s not something I would wish on any family,” she said. She described leaving the marriage as both one of the hardest and one of the most important things she had done.
What she has said about why the marriage ended
French Gates has not publicly identified one event as the definitive cause of the divorce. In a 2022 interview with CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, she said: “It wasn’t one moment or one specific thing that happened. There just came a point in time where there was enough there that I realized it just wasn’t healthy, and I couldn’t trust what we had.”
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In that interview, she also said she disliked Bill Gates’s meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, while explicitly placing them among multiple factors: “As I said, it’s not one thing, it was many things. But I did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no.” Her account does not support reducing the divorce to Epstein or any other single reported event.
How her public descriptions changed from 2022 to 2025
In 2022, French Gates spoke about grief, anger, and healing after the separation. In an October 2022 interview with Fortune, she called the experience “unbelievably painful in innumerable ways.” She also described protecting her children as a concern and said she and Bill Gates continued working together at the Gates Foundation during the separation.
By the March 2025 ELLE interview, she was describing herself as thriving while still acknowledging that divorce is painful. These are statements made at different points in time; neither should be taken as a complete account of her private life today.
Timeline of the separation and public comments
- 1994: Melinda and Bill Gates married, according to CBS’s account.
- May 2021: They announced their separation after 27 years of marriage.
- March 2022: In a CBS Mornings interview, French Gates discussed grief and healing, described the relationship as unhealthy and said she could no longer trust what they had.
- October 2022: Fortune published an interview in which she described the divorce as painful in many ways.
- May–June 2024: French Gates announced she would leave the Gates Foundation; a June TIME profile discussed considerations involving her, her children, and the foundation.
- March 17, 2025: ELLE published the interview in which she said divorce is painful and described herself as thriving on the other side.
The related book discussed in the 2025 interview
ELLE described French Gates’s memoir, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, as forthcoming in April 2025. The interview presented it as a book about life transitions, including the changes surrounding her divorce.
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