A note Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate claimed he found after the financier’s first suspected jail suicide attempt was made public Thursday after it had been sealed and locked in a courthouse vault for nearly five years as part of an unrelated legal dispute.
This story discusses suicide.
US District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, New York, ordered the note’s release after The New York Times petitioned last week to unseal it and other documents in a case involving the cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione.
Few people had known about the note until Tartaglione, a former police officer who is serving a life sentence for killing four people, mentioned it on a podcast last year. Tartaglione claimed he discovered the note in a book in his cell after Epstein was found on July 23, 2019, with a strip of bedsheet around his neck.
“They investigated me for month -- found nothing!!!” said the short note, which is hard to decipher in some places. “It is a treat to be able to choose” the “time to say goodbye," the note continues. “Watcha want me to do -- Bust out cryin!!”
“NO FUN,” the note concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”
Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail in Manhattan, on August 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The medical examiner ruled it a suicide, and authorities have pointed to a series of missteps by jail personnel — including browsing the internet and sleeping when they should've been checking on Epstein — for allowing him to take his own life.
It is unclear who wrote the note that Tartaglione claimed he found. It wasn’t mentioned in the lengthy government reports examining the circumstances of Epstein's death.
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