A federal judge has released a suicide note that Jeffrey Epstein’s cellmate claims the dead sex offender wrote in 2019.
“They investigated me for months — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins. “So 15 year old charges resulted.”
“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continues. “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!! NO FUN. NOT WORTH IT!!”
Epstein’s cellmate in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, Nicholas Tartaglione, told The New York Times that he found the note in July 2019 after an incident in which Epstein was found unresponsive with cloth wrapped around him. After Epstein was moved from that cell, Tartaglione said he found the note in a graphic novel.
“I opened the book to read and there it was,” he said.
Epstein had claimed that the July incident was the result of Tartaglione attacking him, and that he wasn’t suicidal. Tartaglione denied doing so, and told the Times that he handed the note over to his lawyers in case Epstein kept insisting that he had attacked him.
The following month, Epstein died in what authorities ruled was a suicide. A convicted sex offender, he had been arrested on new charges of sex trafficking that allegedly occurred between 2002 and 2005.
Tartaglione, a former police officer in Briarcliff Manor, New York, was convicted of quadruple murder in 2023, and is serving four life sentences in a California prison. He is appealing his conviction and says he is innocent.
The note’s authenticity has not been verified. A Times review of the Justice Department’s Epstein files release found a “cryptic two-page chronology” stating that Tartaglione’s lawyers had authenticated the note. The chronology didn’t explain how.
The note had been sealed as part of Tartaglione’s case.
Judge Kenneth Karas, of the Federal District Court in White Plains, unsealed the letter following a New York Times petition last week. A DOJ spokesperson told the paper that the department hadn’t seen the note.
When reached for comment, a DOJ official told the Daily Beast in a statement: “The note has not yet been authenticated, and this is the first time DOJ is seeing it as well. This purported note was submitted by Tartaglione to the court ex parte as part of sealed proceedings in which DOJ was not involved.”
On Wednesday, Manhattan prosecutors agreed to release the note, telling the judge in a letter that “there appears to be a strong public interest in the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death.”
Alternative theories about Epstein’s death sprang up in part due to security lapses in the now-inactive jail, as well as differing conclusions about an orange shape seen moving up toward Epstein’s cell the night before he was found dead. Additionally, for a time there was about a minute of missing footage showing the exterior of Epstein’s cell, though Congress eventually released the tape.
Adding to the intrigue was a draft statement from the District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s Office announcing his death—dated the day before he was found dead.
