Purported Epstein Suicide Note Is Released
A federal choose has launched a suicide notice purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein that was sealed for years as a part of the legal case of his cellmate.
“They investigated me for months — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the notice begins, including that the outcome was prices going again a few years.
“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the notice continued.
“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the notice reads.
“NO FUN,” it concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”
Mr. Epstein’s cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, said he discovered the note in July 2019 after Mr. Epstein was found unresponsive with a strip of cloth wrapped around his neck. Mr. Epstein survived that incident, but he was found dead weeks later at age 66 in the now shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.
The note was made public on Wednesday by Judge Kenneth M. Karas of Federal District Court in White Plains, NY, who oversaw the cellmate’s case. The judge acted after The New York Times petitioned the court docket final Thursday to unseal the doc and published an article wherein Mr. Tartaglione described the notice and the way it got here into his possession.
The Times has not authenticated whether Mr. Epstein wrote the note, which was placed on the court docket Wednesday evening.
The document remained hidden from public view even as the Justice Department released millions of pages of documents related to Mr. Epstein in a move of unprecedented transparency. The Times searched those records and did not find a copy of the note. (A representative from the Justice Department said the agency had never seen it.)
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The search did flip up a cryptic two-page chronology that described how the notice turned caught up in Mr. Tartaglione’s sophisticated authorized case. The chronology mentioned that Mr. Tartaglione’s legal professionals authenticated the notice, though it didn’t clarify how.
Mr. Tartaglione, a former police officer in Briarcliff Manor, NY, shared a cell with Mr. Epstein whereas awaiting trial in a quadruple murder case. He instructed The Times in current cellphone interviews from a California jail that he discovered the notice in a graphic novel after Mr. Epstein was taken out of their cell after the obvious suicide try.
“I opened the book to read and there it was,” Mr. Tartaglione mentioned. It was written on a bit of yellow paper torn from a authorized pad, he mentioned.
The New York City medical expert ruled Mr. Epstein’s death a suicide. In the years since, revelations of safety lapses contained in the jail have spawned infinite theories about how Mr. Epstein died and whether or not he was murdered.
When jail officers requested Mr. Epstein about crimson marks on his neck after the incident in July, he first mentioned that Mr. Tartaglione had attacked him and that he was not suicidal. Mr. Tartaglione has lengthy denied assaulting Mr. Epstein, who later instructed jail officers he “never had any issues” together with his cellmate.
Mr. Tartaglione mentioned he gave the notice to his legal professionals as a result of he believed it may have been useful if Mr. Epstein continued to assert that he had tried to harm him. Mr. Tartaglione was convicted in 2023 and is now serving 4 life sentences. He has maintained his innocence and has appealed his conviction.
The notice apparently turned a part of a drawn-out authorized dispute amongst Mr. Tartaglione’s legal professionals. Documents associated to the battle had been positioned beneath a court docket seal to guard attorney-client privilege, the filings say.
Before unsealing the notice, Judge Karas requested the events within the case to offer their views on The Times’s request that the supplies be made public. The US lawyer’s workplace in Manhattan, which prosecuted Mr. Tartaglione, didn’t contest the notice’s launch. In a letter to the choose, the prosecutors wrote that “there appears to be a strong public interest in the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
If you’re having ideas of suicide, name or textual content 988 to achieve the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a listing of extra sources.