Supposed Epstein jail cell suicide note unsealed

MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York federal judge on Wednesday made public a letter purported to be a suicide note penned by the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein in a Manhattan jail cell in July 2019.

“Time to say goodbye,” the barely legible, handwritten note reads, believed to be written by Epstein prior to an unsuccessful suicide attempt in his shared cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.

Epstein was found dead three weeks later, one month after his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, while awaiting tentative trial in Manhattan federal court in 2020, officials concluded.

The note was reportedly found stuffed in a graphic novel by Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer who shared a cell with Epstein in July 2019, where Epstein was discovered with an orange cloth around his neck and bruises on his neck from the attempted hanging, and then placed on suicide watch.

“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continues.

The note, on a single page of lined notebook paper, concludes with Epstein supposedly signing off: “NO FUN - NOT WORTH IT!!”

A trio of New York Times reporters ­— Benjamin Weiser, Jan Ransom and Steve Eder — filed a letter to the judge overseeing Tartaglione’s case seeking the release of the note from Tartaglione’s attorney, who had presented the note in the former police officer’s drug trafficking and murder case.

“Mr. Tartaglione has already divulged the contents of the note, so there is nothing left to keep secret,” the reporters wrote in their request to unseal. “And the public interest in note’s disclose is immense.”

After the July 23, 2019, incident, Epstein was moved out of that cell and placed on suicide watch. He was transferred back to the jail’s special housing unit a week later, meaning he was less closely monitored but was still supposed to be checked every 30 minutes. He was also required to have a cellmate, but he was left with none after his cellmate was transferred out of the jail Aug. 9, the day before Epstein’s death, authorities have said.

A day before Epstein was found hanging in his MCC jail cell, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals unsealed thousands of pages of damning exhibit evidence against Epstein from victim-accuser Virginia Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit against Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell over Maxwell’s denial of sex-trafficking accusations.

Prosecutors later charged the two correctional officers responsible for guarding Epstein the night he died with falsifying prison records to conceal that they were sleeping and browsing the internet during the hours they were supposed to be keeping a close watch on prisoners, but the pair ultimately entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department that allowed them to avoid any prison time.

Tartaglione, currently serving four consecutive life sentences for a 2016 quadruple homicide, has reportedly pursued a presidential pardon, potentially through a Trump campaign-linked social media influencer tied to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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