[imagesource: Daniel Berman / Redux]

Melinda Gates has opened up about her and Bill Gates’ high profile divorce, saying that she is not quite ready to be friends.

She explained in an exclusive interview with Gayle King that aired on CBS This Morning on Thursday that friendship might be on the cards over time, but that there is “still healing that needs to happen”.

The couple divorced last May after 27 years of marriage, which Melinda, describing the relationship as ​​”irretrievably broken,” reckons is a new page in her book.

Reflecting on the range of difficult emotions she felt during this time, Melinda said that she cried “a lot of tears for many days,” sometimes while on the floor, reported The Guardian:

“How can I get up? How am I going to move?” she would ask herself, she said.

“I gave every single piece of myself to this marriage. I was committed to this marriage on the day we got engaged and until the day I got out of it … but I also think society used to put things on women like it was our fault,” she said. “I did nothing wrong so I hold my head high.”

She also recalls feeling a lot of anger, per PEOPLE, reflecting on how that is part of the grieving process:

“You’re grieving a loss of something you thought you had and thought you had for your lifetime,” she said.

When reflecting on what caused the demise of their marriage, Melinda mentioned that it was “not one thing but many things”:

“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. I couldn’t trust what we had,” the billionaire philanthropist said.

Before saying that, she was asked about the affair Bill had with an employee 20 years ago, which a spokesperson for the Microsoft co-founder confirmed in May 2021.

She said she definitely believes in forgiveness and confessed that she “thought we had worked through some of that”.

When asked if there were other affairs over the course of their marriage, she merely replied, “Those are questions Bill needs to answer.”

Fair enough.

Then, of course, there is Bill’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein, which has been reported as one of the initial reasons Melinda first considered divorce:

“I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein … I made that clear to him.”

She added that she met Epstein once, because “I wanted to see who this man was and I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door”.

“He was abhorrent, evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards,” Gates said.

Pressed about Gates’s continued meetings with Epstein despite her disapproval, she said: “Any of the questions remaining about Bill’s relationship … those are for Bill to answer.”

But after all that, Melinda says she is starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel:

“I do feel like I’m turning a page in the chapter,” she shared.

“I mean, it’s 2022 and I’m actually really excited about what’s to come and life ahead for me.”

Melinda made it clear that she still has a somewhat friendly working relationship with Bill, together championing the Melinda Gates Foundation, which they co-founded more than 20 years ago.

But she is mostly working on her zen as a single woman, mentioning that she is “dipping my toe in that water a little bit” and open to dating and finding love again.

[sources:guardian&people]