A Convenient Death
The Mysterious Demise
of Jeffrey Epstein
by Alana Goodman &
Daniel Halper
When I was 15 years old, I flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane to Zorro Ranch, where I was
sexual[ly] molested by him for many hours. What I remember most vividly was him explaining
to me how beneficial the experience was for me and how much he was helping me to grow. I
remember feeling so small and powerless, especially after he positioned me by laying me on
his floor so that I was confronted by all the framed photographs on his dresser of him smiling
with wealthy celebrities and politicians.
JANE DOE #9[1]
INTRODUCTION
Conspiracy theories spring up when an official story is implausible, unpersuasive, or, sometimes, total
bunk. These days they seem to develop on the margins of the internet and then spread to the general
public—often very, very quickly. The best are not made up out of whole cloth. They are carefully
considered alternative theories to understand something that does not make sense. They rely on facts, or at
least kernels of truth, which are then expanded and extrapolated on to come somewhere, somehow closer
to telling a more complete and (one hopes) truthful story.
So, what happens when a conspiracy theory comes true? That is what seemed to happen on August 10,
2019, when one of the most notorious inmates ever to inhabit the Metropolitan Correctional Center was
found hanging in his cell.
Ever since Jeffrey Epstein, notorious pedophile and pal/client to the rich and famous, was arrested,
people had speculated that he would be murdered. Over the years, Epstein had befriended some of the
most powerful men in the world—presidents, princes, business titans—embroiling many of them in his
sex scandals. As he awaited trial, many people mused that he had more secrets to share, more scandals to
expose, perhaps more powerful names to implicate. What would happen if he decided to squeal? Worse,
for his powerful allies, would he be so desperate to get out of jail that he would be willing to tell
authorities whatever they wanted to hear just for the chance to be free? Would they risk this possibility, or
would they ensure that he could not expose them?
“If Epstein talks, there’s gonna be a lot of powerful people who could go down,” Nick Bryant, a
dogged reporter who had been on the Epstein case for far longer than just about everyone else, speculated
in an interview.
1
The Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown went a little further in her detailing of the “very powerful
people” close to Epstein. “They’re sweating a little bit, especially today,” Brown told MSNBC the day
after Epstein was arrested. “There have been a lot of names that I could see on these message pads
[listing clients] on a regular basis as part of the evidence. These message pads where they would call and
leave Epstein messages, such as, ‘I’m at this hotel.’ Why do you do that, unless you’re expecting him to
send you a girl to visit you at your hotel? So there are probably quite a few important people, powerful
people, who are sweating it out right now. We’ll have to wait and see whether Epstein is going to name
names.”
2
Epstein’s sudden, unexpected death brought that to a most convenient end. It ensured those secrets
were never revealed, that so many questions would never be answered. To his accomplices and abettors,
his would have been the most timely and useful suicide ever committed.
If that’s really what it was. Questions about whether the notorious sex offender had been murdered
arose within minutes once the news of his death reached the public.
Even President Donald Trump, a former friend of Epstein’s, re-tweeted a Twitter message from one of
his supporters that speculated Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”
“I see #TrumpBodyCount trending but we know who did this!” said the Twitter post.
As reporters who have, between us, covered plenty of news stories and unsubstantiated conspiracy
theories, we have become natural skeptics. We’ve learned to take with a grain of salt wild accusations or
in some cases wishful thinking, even when they come from the president of the United States. But as we
began to look into the Epstein story, we started to understand the widespread skepticism. The official
story of Epstein’s death had holes in it—big holes—from the beginning. Cameras that might have
chronicled the scene mysteriously failed. Tapes were suddenly erased, disappearing, or someway
inoperable.
Reasonable questions multiplied. Why were the guards at that cell block so lax, especially when
dealing with such a notorious and high-profile cellmate? Why were the security cameras so error prone at
this particular moment? Was this really just a jailhouse “comedy of errors” with a distinctly unfunny
ending? How could a prison that housed some of the most deadly and dangerous criminals in the nation
really behave so unprofessionally, so sloppily? Or was there something more going on?
No one has done a good job answering these questions. Not the feds. Not any state government. Not
New York City officials. Not the media. Not Jeffrey Epstein’s friends and associates—and there are many
—who themselves are still enjoying life from their perch at the upper echelon of our political, elite class.
An August 2019 public poll conducted by Emerson College found that 34 percent of Americans believed
that Epstein had been murdered.
3 By January 2020, 52 percent of Americans believed he was “murdered
to prevent him from testifying against powerful people with whom he associated.”
As we looked into the case for ourselves, we kept turning up more questions to answer, more
suspicions to explore, more new facts that emerged to fill the gaps and challenge the official narrative. We
examined the mystery of his finances and his secretive business arrangements. We interviewed those who
knew Jeffrey Epstein well, either as friends, business or legal associates, or because they were
victimized by him.
A Convenient Death will not help you trust media accounts of Epstein’s death. It will not restore your
faith in the government or other powerful American institutions.
What it will do is take readers inside the dark corners of the American and international power
structure, revealing why any number of people could have been driven to drastic action to make sure those
corners stayed in the shadows. And it will make readers uncomfortable, especially those who believe
there is nothing to be learned from Epstein’s crime spree and the complete mishandling of justice.
In part 1, “The Death,” we tell the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s final weeks, days, and hours. We examine
the evidence he left behind. We lay out the problems with the official narrative, and through our exclusive
interviews and never-before-revealed reporting we address the lingering questions that perplexed so
many Americans. As you’ll see, the closer sources were to the story, the less they were likely to believe
that Epstein had committed suicide. They believed that was not his style. Not part of his ethos. And that it
would be a bit too convenient for him.
In part 2, “An Indecent Life,” we tell the stories of some of the rich and famous who considered
Epstein a friend and colleague. We also examine Epstein’s life and consider who, if anyone, might have
benefited from his mysterious demise.
We would like to include a brief note before the story begins. Both of us are investigative political
reporters with wide-ranging experience breaking news on sensitive and uncomfortable political subjects.
Jeffrey Epstein’s life, and death, is certainly one of those areas. Readers should be aware that the facts
reported in the following pages are based exclusively on conversations with direct sources, primary court
and public records documents, and published media accounts.
We have extensively interviewed those who knew Epstein and his alleged accomplices and victims,
individuals who worked at the prison where he died, and those who investigated his shocking and
unexpected death.
We came to this case with fresh eyes and open minds. In the end the story is much worse and more
pernicious than even we believed. Epstein’s story isn’t just about Epstein; it’s about the horrifying
misdeeds of the elite and of those who covered up their corruption. The powerful may not want you to
know these stories, but it’s time Americans learned the truth.
PART I
The Death
1
Final Hours
To the day he died, he never thought he did anything wrong.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ
Ten days before Jeffrey Epstein’s death, the reception area on the third floor of the Metropolitan
Correctional Center was buzzing with activity. Lawyers carrying legal pads shuffled in and out of the
second conference room from the left, aggravating the desk guard who had to walk over every time
and unlock the door.
The conference room was barely bigger than a prison cell, with just enough space for a cheap wooden
table and five chairs. The only window overlooked the reception area, where the guard kept watch from
his desk. There were no laptops or cell phones allowed. Occasionally, one of the attorneys would step out
and relay a message to a couple of young female lawyers camped in the waiting area. The women, a pair
of attractive recent law school grads, were couriers for Jeffrey Epstein. They, for an hourly fee, also kept
him company between his meetings. [wtf??? pond scum DC]
Inside the room, holding court, was Epstein. The sixty-six-year-old multimillionaire, silver-haired and
well-built from daily exercise, had been in jail for nearly a month on charges of sex trafficking underage
girls. Most of his days were spent in this conference room, a designated area for legal meetings. He
looked good—healthy, even—in his prison-issued orange jumpsuit and matching socks. On this particular
day, August 1, 2019, he seemed upbeat and focused as his lawyers circulated in and out. Today was an
important day for him, a day he hoped to take his first big step toward legal victory and freedom and away
from a place where he was miserable.
Epstein, a germaphobe and lifelong teetotaler, hated the indignities of MCC—the roaches, the rodents,
the drug addicts. His current cellmate was a “junkie” who “smoked crack in the cell,” he complained to
friends. He was also fearful of other prisoners due to his great wealth, upwards of $500 million,
including real estate. His finances were splashed all over the news—“$56 Million Upper East Side
Mansion”—and he worried about getting shaken down by protection rackets.
1 He had reportedly started
paying off other inmates through their commissary accounts.
In the afternoon, the prison psychologist stopped by for a ten-minute counseling session. The previous
month, Epstein had been placed on twenty-four-hour suicide watch after prison guards found him
unconscious in his cell. (Epstein denied that there had been a suicide attempt, but he was certainly not
happy in prison.) He was removed from suicide watch after six days, on July 29, but he was still under
psychological monitoring.
After the therapy session, Epstein met with his friend and lawyer David Schoen, who he believed was
his key to getting out. Epstein had known Schoen, a balding, bespectacled sixty-one-year-old Alabama
civil rights attorney, for more than a decade. Both men liked to trash-talk and had a distinct contempt for
authority. They had grown closer over the past year, and Epstein often reached out to Schoen for legal
advice.
Today Epstein had a bigger ask. He wanted to restructure his legal team and bring Schoen on board. It
was an important step, one that he thought would help refocus his talented but disorganized camp of
lawyers, putting them in a good position for the fight ahead. Moreover, he faced a curious problem: he felt
let down by some of his more high-profile lawyers and betrayed because he did not believe they were
fighting hard enough for him. He had seen how anyone associated with him had taken a public beating.
Epstein had never been completely immune to or unaware of the public lashing he received. And yet he
had no sympathy for the lawyers who would gladly cash his big checks and at the same time not
sufficiently fight for him or, worse, were embarrassed to be associated with him. He needed someone
who was fully on his side and asked Schoen to take the lead on trial preparation.
Epstein’s trial date had been set for the following June, nearly a year away. His legal team believed
they needed at least that much time to prepare for the complex case and review more than a million pages
of discovery materials that prosecutors were expected to turn over.
Schoen said he was willing to come on board. The two men agreed to reconvene the week of August
12 to move forward on preparing for the trial. In the meantime, Schoen, who lived in Atlanta, planned to
relocate part-time to New York for the duration of the case and began setting up a team of lawyers, too.
Schoen’s support thrilled Epstein and gave him hope. Finally he was going to elevate the lawyer who
would stand tall next to him and be willing to accept the public blow back for being associated with him.
“He was very upbeat,” recalled Schoen. “He didn’t want to be charged, but if he was, he was going to
fight it all the way.”
🔓🔓🔓
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, where the disgraced mogul spent his final days, is a twelve-story
cinder-block building near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in lower Manhattan. Built in 1975 by Gruzen
& Partners—the same design firm that built the posh Solow Tower condo building that Epstein lived in as
an investment banker in the 1980s—the prison embodies that decade’s brutalist architecture, with its
poured-concrete walls and stark rectangular towers. The windows are made of thick shatterproof plastic
with no obvious bars. There is no ground-level yard or security fence. From the outside, it could be
mistaken for an aging government office building.
There, Epstein awaited his federal trial at the penitentiary that previously safely housed drug lords (El
Chapo), mafiosi (John Gotti), terrorists (al-Qaeda operatives), Ponzi schemers (Bernie Madoff), and
fraudsters (Paul Manafort).
2 Epstein was incarcerated in the Special Housing Unit, a wing known as 9-
South. The section is largely reserved for inmates in protective custody or who had been placed there for
disciplinary purposes.
Epstein, a self-described money manager from Coney Island who claimed to work exclusively for
billionaires and had built a fortune, was facing up to forty-five years in prison on underage sex trafficking
charges. According to prosecutors, Epstein had recruited and sexually abused dozens of teenage girls at
his houses in Manhattan and Palm Beach between 2002 and 2005. This was his second arrest for sex
crimes; he was previously convicted of soliciting and procuring underage prostitutes in 2008. But the
prior case had involved state charges in Florida, and Epstein had been able to cut a deal for a lenient
sentence in a work-release program. This time, he was facing federal charges in the U.S. District Court
for the Southern District of New York.
“The victims, who were as young as 14 years of age, were told by Epstein or other individuals to
partially or fully undress before beginning the ‘massage,’” according to the July 2019 federal indictment.
3
“During the encounter, Epstein would escalate the nature and scope of physical contact with his victim to
include, among other things, sex acts such as groping and direct or indirect contact with the victim’s
genitals.
“Epstein would typically also masturbate during these sexualized encounters, ask victims to touch him
while he masturbated, and touch victims’ genitals with his hands or sex toys,” said the indictment.
“Victims were typically paid hundreds of dollars in cash for each encounter.”
Epstein’s legal issues had already caused problems for his powerful political friends. His looming
high-profile trial could be an even greater liability.
The former president Bill Clinton was being hammered in the press for taking multiple trips on
Epstein’s private Boeing 727, nicknamed the Lolita Express.
4 Prince Andrew’s position in the royal
family was in jeopardy after photos emerged of him with his hand around the waist of one of Epstein’s
alleged underage “sex slaves.” President Donald Trump was being scrutinized for his social outings with
Epstein in the 1990's, and a handful of other political figures—the former senator George Mitchell, the
former governor Bill Richardson, and the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak—also faced
allegations for their involvement with Epstein.
But Epstein had no intention of going down quietly. He did not believe he had done anything wrong.
“His theory was always that sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old's are having sex with their
boyfriends,” said Alan Dershowitz, the high-profile defense attorney who represented Epstein off and on
for years, in an interview. “So, what’s the big deal? They made $250. They gave him a massage. He
masturbated. That’s the end of it. He didn’t think he ruined anybody’s life. He never thought he did
anything wrong. To the day he died, he never thought he did anything wrong. He thought that the culture
was all screwed up about sex and young women.”
Epstein’s lawyers were confident of his chances. They believed the federal case against him was
“pretty weak” due to several factors. First, Epstein had already entered a non-prosecution agreement with
the Department of Justice more than a decade earlier that allowed him to plead guilty to state charges in
Florida and avoid federal prosecution in that district. Because the latest charges involved some of the
same incidents and victims, they argued that the federal government’s Department of Justice was not
allowed to retry him in another state.
Second, Epstein’s lawyers felt they could make an argument for double jeopardy based on the prior
prosecution. Finally, they thought the government had flimsy evidence when it came to interstate
transportation of the girls, the key basis for bringing a federal indictment.
“He had a pretty good case,” said Dershowitz. “Although the deck was stacked against him because he
was Jeffrey Epstein, he might very well have won the case.”
💲💲💲
Epstein might have had another reason to feel he could get off easy.
When the feds raided his Manhattan mansion after his arrest in early July, they found “a vast trove of
lewd photographs of young-looking women or girls.” The photographs were locked up and highly
organized. It amounted to child pornography. But it may also have been something else: blackmail,
featuring not just young, innocent children but also the perpetrators.
It is unclear how Epstein acquired his photo stash, but friends said he had an extensive video
surveillance system throughout his house in New York. Everything was monitored—the guest bedrooms,
the bathrooms.
“There were cameras everywhere,” said one longtime friend in an interview. “Why? That’s good
evidence that he’s a blackmailer, and it’s good evidence that he has some bad stuff on people.”
⏳⏳⏳
Meanwhile, Epstein continued his daily monopoly of one of the third-floor legal conference rooms, which
were technically supposed to be available to all inmates on a first-come basis. He filled his time with
various legal matters. On Thursday, August 8, Epstein’s financial attorneys established a trust in the Virgin
Islands to house his assets. The move shielded the full scope of his fortune and created more legal hurdles
for accusers who sued him for damages. Epstein also signed a new copy of his last will and testament that
would transfer his $577 million fortune in disclosed assets to the trust in the event of his death.
The next day, August 9, Epstein met with his defense lawyers in the cramped third-floor conference
room to talk trial strategy. By all accounts he was in a fighting mood, “just barking out orders with all the
stuff that I had told them we need to start working on,” said Schoen, who was back in Atlanta for the
Jewish sabbath but received a readout after the meeting. “He [was] so excited about going forward.”
The team planned to file an appeal motion the following Monday to try to get him out on bail—a fairly
long shot. His lawyers were more confident about other avenues they were pursuing, such as their
attempts to get the case tossed due to the non-prosecution agreement Epstein had entered with the federal
government years earlier in Florida.
“We had a significant motion to dismiss. This was not a futile, you know, defeatist attitude,” Epstein’s
lawyer Martin Weinberg would tell the court later.
The huddle lasted until nearly 8:00 p.m., when Epstein was escorted back to his cell by the overnight
guard Tova Noel. That would be the last time anyone outside the prison saw him alive.
2
A Corpse on 9-South
It seems to me that he outsmarted everyone so far, and his ghost is still laughing at us.
COURT STATEMENT BY ONE
OF EPSTEIN’S VICTIMS
Shortly after 6:00 the next morning, the two guards on duty, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, set out to
deliver breakfast trays to the inmates on 9-South. Prison sources would later report hearing sounds of
shrieking from the vicinity of Epstein’s cell. Then handheld radios in the facility crackled to life,
blaring the alert to all the guards on the morning shift: “Body alarm on South, body alarm on South.”
Thomas said that he and Noel found the sixty-six-year-old inmate unresponsive and hanging from his
bunk by a strip of orange fabric. The guard said he cut Epstein down from the makeshift noose.
“Responding prison staff immediately initiated life-saving measures,” said the MCC warden Lamine
N’Diaye in a letter to the U.S. District Court judge Richard M. Berman later that morning. They called
paramedics who transported Epstein to the hospital five blocks away “for treatment of life-threatening
injuries.”
Epstein’s cell was six feet by nine feet, according to MCC employees we interviewed, about half the
size of an average parking space. The floor was dark gray concrete. A bunk bed, around four feet high
with a metal frame, spanned the length of the far wall, and a concrete table the size of a TV dinner tray
was bolted to the wall to the left of the door. This was the only furniture. Next to the entrance there was a
metal toilet with no seat. The one window in the room, behind the bed, was latticed with thin wire bars.
Photos of the cell taken by investigators in the aftermath showed signs of confusion and perhaps even a
struggle: one mattress on the floor, one still in place on the bottom bunk. Piles of crumpled orange sheets
and fabric, a lot more than one bed’s worth, were strewn around the room. A discarded sleep apnea
machine was next to the toilet, with an upended paper coffee cup tossed on top of the wires. Nearby, there
appeared to be a couple of brown puddles—or stains—on the concrete floor.
After Epstein’s death, investigators found a yellow legal pad on the table with a few lines scribbled
on it in ballpoint pen:
1
[Guard] kept me in a locked shower stall for one hour.
[Guard] sent in burnt food.
Giant bugs crawling on my hands.
No fun!
“No fun” was underlined.
Epstein allegedly hanged himself from the frame of the upper bed bunk, about four feet high. The
photos of his prison cell after his death, obtained by his brother, appear to show multiple attempts to tie
nooses to different pieces of furniture. There are small scraps of orange fabric tied to the window grates,
the metal frame of the bed, and even a supporting bar under the table, about half a foot off the ground. 17s
Medicine bottles were lined up neatly on the top bunk, where the mattress had been removed. There
were no drugs found in Epstein’s system during the toxicology report, and Dr. Michael Baden, a respected
independent pathologist who observed Epstein’s autopsy on behalf of his family members, said the bottles
contained over-the-counter pills.
Epstein was six feet tall, nearly two feet taller than the height of the bunk bed. To hang himself from it,
prison insiders said, he would have had to lean forward and possibly kneel, to cut off his circulation, until
he suffocated.
“For him to pull the sheet tight, that means he would have had to go to the bottom bunk, tie the sheet
through the wiring that’s holding the top bunk, put it around his neck, and somehow try to lean forward, or
something like this, to apply the pressure to cut off his circulation,” Albie Rivera, a former MCC
correctional lieutenant who worked at the prison for more than a decade, told us.
Epstein, strapped to a gurney and still clad in an orange jumpsuit, was wheeled into New York Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital around 7:30 a.m. A paramedic worked a manual breathing tube
into his mouth, but resuscitation efforts were no use by then. He was pronounced dead at 7:47 a.m.,
although a subsequent autopsy would indicate he was deceased long before he arrived.
Dr. Michael Baden, the pathologist hired by Epstein’s lawyers to monitor the autopsy, told us that the
financier had been dead for at least forty-five minutes, but more likely for hours, before the two guards
reported finding him and started initiating “life-saving measures.”
⌛⌛⌛
As news spread that Saturday morning, reactions were varied and emotions mixed.
Money men, political players, socialites, and media moguls waking up on the Upper East Side—the
few who hadn’t yet made it out to the Hampton's—must have breathed a sigh of relief. In some ways, the
deceased could be said to be “in” elite Manhattan circles but not “of” them. Perhaps, at the same time, he
reflected the true nature of his world—their world—in ways they would never admit, even to themselves.
At any rate, he was gone, and whatever secrets he had held were safe.
Others reacted with outrage. Gloria Allred, the celebrity attorney representing several of Epstein’s
underage victims, was home at her beachfront condo in Malibu on August 10 when she first got word that
Epstein was dead. She scrambled to contact her clients so that she could break the news to them before
they heard it on TV or, worse, from an inquiring reporter.
“It was, of course, surprising and shocking,” recalled Allred in an interview. “I had no reason to
believe that this would happen. Could happen. Never entered my mind.”
“I was concerned about my clients because, naturally, there would be the questions that everybody
has: How could this have happened? Why did it happen?”
Allred had plenty of questions about Epstein’s death. How could such a high-value inmate, who had
reportedly attempted suicide just three weeks before, have had the means and opportunity to kill himself?
Wasn’t he supposed to be on suicide watch?
“I felt that the system had failed the victims for many years in Florida, and elsewhere, and now the
system failed them again,” she said when reached on the phone. “It’s failed Epstein, and it’s failed the
court.”
Epstein’s legal team was even more shocked.
In the days before his death, “we did not see a despairing, despondent suicidal person,” one of his
attorneys, Martin Weinberg, told U.S. District Court judge Richard M. Berman days later.
2
Weinberg noted that Epstein had been preparing to file a bail appeal motion on Monday, August 12.
“The timing for a pretrial detainee to commit suicide on August 10, when his bail pending appeal motion
is being filed on August 12, strikes us as implausible,” he said.
“We’re not here without significant doubts regarding the conclusion of suicide,” said Weinberg. “We
are not here to say what happened. We don’t know what happened. But we deeply want to know what
happened to our client.”
Finding information, even for Epstein’s lawyers and family members, would prove difficult. The self proclaimed financier’s cellmate had been transferred the morning before he died, and he had not been
replaced, despite directives from prison psychologists that Epstein not be housed alone.
MCC officials also neglected to preserve the scene where the body was found. Thomas, the prison
guard on duty, claimed he cut down Epstein’s body from a noose, making it difficult for investigators to
determine what position he died in. Prison officials had also called paramedics to transport his body to a
hospital, instead of keeping the body in place, as they are required to do in the case of an inmate death.
By the time the Department of Justice investigators arrived, a parade of correctional officers, prison
staff, and paramedics had already walked through Epstein’s cell, potentially disrupting or contaminating
the scene. The prison also immediately transferred the other inmates in Epstein’s tier to other locations in
the prison, making it more difficult to locate witnesses.
“Instead of having the cell in the condition it was found, if he had been dead for 45 minutes or two
hours or four hours, there were efforts to move him and, therefore, make it more difficult to reconstruct
whether or not he died of suicide or some other cause,” Weinberg told the court.
If Epstein had indeed killed himself, that should be clear in the autopsy required by New York state
law. However, if something fishy happened, it seemed not impossible that the government report would be
untrustworthy.
One of Epstein’s attorneys had a connection with Dr. Baden, and persuaded Epstein’s brother, Mark,
to hire Baden to independently observe the autopsy.
Baden is perhaps the most well-known forensic pathologist in the country and host of HBO’s
documentary series Autopsy. Baden, eighty-five, a grandfatherly man with a white mustache, was the
former chief medical examiner of New York City and has conducted more than twenty thousand autopsies
over his career. He is famous—or as famous as a pathologist can be—but he also is well respected in the
medical community. A rare breed.
The autopsy was conducted the day after Epstein’s death by Dr. Kristin Roman, fifty-four, a respected
veteran with the city’s Medical Examiner’s Office. “The beautiful thing about the body is that it doesn’t
lie,” she once told a reporter. “It tells you its story.”
3
As the two pathologists examined Epstein’s body, the first thing that caught Baden’s eye was the
unusual location of the ligature mark. It was right in the middle of Epstein’s neck, a thin, dark red line
running horizontally across the Adam’s apple.
“The ligature mark on the neck was lower than in the usual suicidal hanging. Usually the ligature is
high up near the mandible, the jawbone. And here it was in the middle of the neck, which is more common
in homicidal strangulation,” Baden revealed over the course of a series of interviews.
The doctors also noticed there was no sign in the legs of a purplish marbling effect—known as lividity
—that is typically seen when blood settles in the lower extremities after death.
“The lividity and settling of the blood is normally on the lowest part of the body,” said Baden. “If he
dies hanging, upright hanging, the lividity is both front and back on the legs, because that’s where the
blood settles. And in this instance there was no such lividity present, so it didn’t look like a normal,
traditional hanging.”
When the pathologists looked under the skin, they found something else—an anomaly that Baden said
he had not seen before in his sixty-year career.
There were three separate fractures in the front of Epstein’s neck: the left and right cartilage (also
known as the Adam’s apple), and a horseshoe-shaped bone under the chin called the hyoid.
In the early 1970s, Baden was appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to sit on a medical review
board that examines every death that takes place in the New York state and city prison systems. He
continues to sit on the board to this day.
According to Baden, nearly 90 percent of the thousand suicidal prison hangings he has reviewed
include no fractures. Around 10 percent have a fractured hyoid, and in rare cases he has seen a fracture of
the cartilage.
“We’ve never had three fractures,” said Baden. “We haven’t seen that, that I can recall, in almost fifty
years we’ve examined every single case.”
Baden said these injuries are far more common in strangulation murders.
“We’ve had multiple fractures if there’s been a manual strangulation or ligature strangulation, where
the loop, the rope, or the hands go across the Adam’s apple, the thyroid cartilage,” he said.
According to Roman’s notes, which were obtained by Epstein’s brother, Mark, the body also had
bruising on the back of the neck and an injection mark on the inner arm. There were also burst capillaries
in Epstein’s eyes, which Baden claimed were more consistent with manual strangulation, which can build
up pressure in the face.
Baden said the bruising could have been caused by an Emergency Medical Technician placing a brace
around Epstein’s neck. He said the injection mark was fresh and could have come from attempts by
paramedics to revive Epstein, but he said federal officials have declined to say whether paramedics
injected him with anything.
The findings were enough to raise questions. At the conclusion of the autopsy, Roman said she needed
more information to determine the cause and manner of death. She issued a temporary death certificate,
indicating that the autopsy was “inconclusive.”
3
Stonewalling
In the wake of the autopsy report, social media theories flourished. Epstein was killed by the Mossad,
claimed YouTube commentators and anti-Semitic bloggers. He was assassinated by the Clintons or
Donald Trump, claimed Republicans and Democrats depending on their partisan affiliation. He was
still alive and living it up on an island—maybe extracted from the prison in a CIA operation—and the
dead body was a fake or a double.
The Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, perhaps realizing the exploding PR crisis,
took quick action in an attempt to quash the theories. Five days after issuing a temporary death certificate
and labeling the cause “inconclusive,” New York City’s chief medical examiner, Barbara Sampson,
announced that she would be changing the manner of death to “suicide.”
What had prompted that change in just a few days? Sampson declined to give specifics, saying that the
determination was made “after careful review of all investigative information, including complete
autopsy findings.” But the announcement came only amid immense public pressure and withering media
scrutiny into the story.
In spite of public skepticism, there was certainly evidence to support the conclusion that Epstein took
his own life. Suicides are not uncommon in prisons. He had revised his will just a couple of days before
his death. He had, by the prison’s determination, attempted suicide just weeks before (although he had
denied it to friends and lawyers). He was also accustomed to an extremely comfortable lifestyle and was
disgusted with his new living conditions behind bars.
“Mental abuse for a man that lived one of the best lifestyles in the world would have crushed him. He
didn’t have the inner strength . . . few people would,” said Epstein’s former boss in the investment
banking industry Steven Hoffenberg, who himself spent eighteen years in prison for financial fraud,
including a stint at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Epstein’s former lawyer Alan Dershowitz said he believes Epstein was distraught at the possibility of
spending the rest of his life in jail.
“I think he didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, and he thought he was going to spend the rest of
his life in prison, and that was not something he would want to do,” said Dershowitz. “I haven’t seen the
[medical] evidence, and I have an open mind about everything, but I think the likelihood is that he took his
own life because he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison and didn’t see any exit route.”
Lending further evidence to the suicide theory was the earlier alleged attempt, in July. In that case,
Epstein was found unconscious in his cell with pieces of fabric around his neck, according to Department
of Justice officials. The responding guards reportedly dropped the unconscious Epstein on his face twice
while carrying him out of the cell, one inmate told the podcast Epstein: Devil in the Darkness.
1
“When they carried him out of the cell, man, they dropped him on his face. Face-first. I heard it hit the
floor with the loudest thud. I’ll never forget it because it was sickening. But Epstein didn’t make a sound
’cus he was out cold,” said the inmate.
Prison officials determined that Epstein had attempted to commit suicide. But he denied it to his
lawyers, telling them that he had some sort of clash with his bunkmate, the accused quadruple murderer
and former cop Nick Tartaglione. His lawyers believed him.
“Without going into the specifics of what he said in the conversation . . . my impressions are that it
was not a suicide attempt,” said Epstein’s lawyer David Schoen in an interview. “It wasn’t an attempt to
kill him, either. It was a prank gone wrong or an aggressive sort of thing from his cellmate that never
should have happened.”
Epstein received medical care and was placed on suicide watch. But prison psychologists took him
off after just a week, although he was still required to participate in therapy sessions. He was returned to
the Special Housing Unit, under doctors’ orders that he be placed in the cell closest to the guards’ desk so
he could easily be monitored.
2 He was also assigned a new bunkmate, and his medical file prohibited
prison officials from putting him in a cell by himself. But when Epstein’s new cellmate was transferred
out on the morning of August 9, 2019, no other inmate was transferred in.
Dr. Thomas Caffrey, the former chief psychologist at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, said in an
interview that it sounded “fishy” that the prison would put “negligent officers in charge of preserving the
life of a very international and high-profile inmate.” He said he was surprised to learn Epstein had been
removed from suicide watch after just a week.
“Someone who attempted suicide, that’s very high probability of trying again, especially within the
same couple of months. It sounds premature to end it after a week,” Caffrey said in a phone conversation.
And yet no matter how much one could rationalize Epstein offing himself, none of those arguments
should have prompted the coroner to change the official government findings.
But Sampson appears to have overruled the pathologist conducting the medical examination of the
dead body—despite there apparently being no new evidence presented to call into question the findings of
the exam.
“The usual information that is needed in a jail/prisoner hanging is . . . When was the person last seen,
checked on? What was the position of the body when it was found? Was he dead, was he on the ground,
was he hanging, was he seated?” Michael Baden said in an interview. “That’s very important.”
Epstein’s lawyers asked Sampson for that information and were told the case was closed. Mark
Epstein, Jeffrey’s younger brother and his only living relative, said federal investigators have refused to
provide him with medical records, names of first responders, and names of the other prisoners on
Epstein’s tier. The feds cited the ongoing investigation into the two prison guards who were on duty that
night and first found the body, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas.
It turned out that Noel and Thomas had failed to check on Epstein for at least eight hours, despite
requirements that they walk through and check on prisoners every thirty minutes. Noel, a thirty-one-year old National Guard veteran, had been a correctional officer at MCC since 2016, a career change after
brief stints at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and as a mail handler for the U.S. Postal Service.
Thomas, forty-one, was a warehouse supervisor at the prison but often moonlighted as a guard for extra
cash. He had worked at MCC since 2007.
On the night and morning of Epstein’s death, the guards filed “more than 75 30-minute round entries”
falsely claiming that they checked on Epstein’s tier, according to the DOJ.
3
“We messed up,” Thomas admitted to his supervisor after the body was found. “We didn’t do any
rounds.”
4
The video also showed that Noel and Thomas spent most of the night sitting at the guards’ desk, which
was in a common area ten to fifteen feet away from Epstein’s cell, within easy earshot of his death. For
two hours, the guards appeared to be sleeping at their desks. At other points of the night, they surfed the
web. Noel browsed furniture sales. Thomas shopped for motorcycles. They didn’t conduct any of the
required checks on Epstein’s tier between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., although they did fill out logbooks
claiming they made the checks. In fact, Noel, who had started working at 4:00 p.m., failed to conduct a
single check during her entire time on the clock, according to the Department of Justice.
Noel was the last person to escort Epstein into his cell for the evening at 7:49. At around 10:30 p.m.,
she walked up to the gate outside Epstein’s tier. His cell, which had a window to the tier hallway, was
just a couple of feet from her. She stood outside the gate for a moment. Then she turned around and
walked back to her desk.
Epstein had a history of run-ins with Noel. In notes found after his death, he accused her of serving
him “burnt food.” Epstein was not popular with many of the guards, who found him to be demanding and
seemed annoyed by the special privileges he received—for example, the fact that he was allowed to meet
with his attorneys for eight hours or more a day. The guards had to walk him back and forth to these
meetings, up and down flights of stairs—more work for them.
Guards at the prison were routinely overworked due to federal budget cuts, according to Eric Young,
president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of Prison Locals, the union for
correctional officers. They often picked up double shifts, working sixteen hours or more.
“It wasn’t a matter of how [suicide] happened or it happening, but it was only a matter of time for it to
happen. It was inevitable. Our staff is severely overworked,” Young said in a statement.
5
At midnight, Thomas arrived for his 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift. He and Epstein also had something
of a history. Thomas was one of the MCC guards on duty who responded to Epstein’s alleged suicide
attempt in July.
Prison guards have strong union protections and are rarely prosecuted for negligence, but Noel and
Thomas were indicted in November on charges of falsifying records and conspiracy to defraud the
government. Thomas faces a maximum of twenty years in prison; Noel faces a maximum of thirty. Noel
and Thomas turned down plea agreements, according to the Associated Press.
6 Lawyers for Noel and
Thomas declined to make their clients available for interviews.
Those who are familiar with the internal workings of MCC say it’s hard to believe such a high-profile
prisoner as Jeffrey Epstein could have died—by either suicide or otherwise—without the knowledge or
assistance of prison employees.
“At nighttime like that, you can hear everything. You can hear a pin drop. Everybody’s sleeping; it’s
quiet,” Albie Rivera, the former longtime MCC guard, revealed in an interview. “If they were ten, fifteen
feet away from his cell, they should have been able to hear him. You could hear him get up; you could
hear everything he’s doing. The window’s right there, to his door, you could look. You could see what
he’s doing; there’s no way of obstructing the view.”
Would guards have been able to hear the sound of someone ripping up strips of sheets, which he
allegedly used to make the nooses? “Of course,” said Rivera.
“I wouldn’t rule out foul play somehow,” he said. “To me it sounds like he could have been killed. It’s
very hard to say that he killed himself.”
—
There was more strangeness to come, in addition to the guards’ negligence and silence. In the days after
Epstein’s death, news outlets reported that the surveillance camera monitoring his cell had malfunctioned
the night of his death and no footage had been captured.
7
The news sounded peculiar, even to other correctional officers who had worked at the prison.
“I find that so odd. So odd,” said one former longtime guard at the Metropolitan Correctional Center
in an interview. “How do you not have a functional, working camera? Of all people, that man’s cell.
“Does that raise a flag in your brain? I know it does in mine,” he added. “Why, in every other cell the
cameras are operational, but Epstein’s was not?”
Rivera said broken cameras would be quickly noticed and fixed if they were monitoring a high-value
inmate.
“If there were ones that were inoperable, they should have been inoperable for only a few minutes.
They would have come in and fixed them right away. Of course, especially with a high-profile inmate like
that,” Rivera said in an interview.
Another longtime MCC guard questioned the lack of working cameras monitoring the inside of the tier,
saying this was almost unimaginable for a high-value inmate.
“There’s cameras in every cell,” said the correctional officer. “Now you get an individual like
Epstein. Don’t you think his camera should have been working? Don’t you think he should have been
placed in a cell that had a working, functional camera?”
There was at least one functional camera, but it was outside Epstein’s tier. The footage indicated that
nobody had entered or left the only door to his section the entire night, which housed eight two-man jail
cells, according to the Department of Justice. However, it would not have shown the activities of any of
the dozen or so inmates already on the cellblock.
It would get yet stranger months later in November 2019 when Attorney General William Barr told the
Associated Press “that he personally reviewed security footage that confirmed that no one entered the
area where Epstein was housed on the night he died.”
8 Barr would conclude that while protocol was not
followed, it was a suicide. But if he got to personally review the security footage, why were others
apparently not able to see it? And, more surprisingly, why did the footage apparently disappear after his
viewing? Officials would in January 2020 say the footage “no longer exists” due to “technical errors.”
9
—
Mark Epstein has been fighting to get more information on his brother’s death, without success. “He
wasn’t close to his brother, but he loves his brother and he wanted to know what happened,” said Dr.
Baden.
Mark Epstein, a Manhattan real estate investor, said in a phone call that so far the feds have refused to
provide him with medical records and the names of first responders.
The younger Epstein said he hasn’t reached a conclusion on what happened to his brother. “I don’t
have a theory. I’m not speculating,” he said. He has also been reluctant to talk to the press: “This is not
about me. That’s why you don’t see pictures of me, I don’t go on camera for anybody.”
But his own review of the evidence—at least the limited number of nonpublic records he has been
able to obtain—has raised questions in his mind.
Mark Epstein was able to get copies of photographs of his brother’s cell and body, taken by
investigators after his death. He noticed at least one strange discrepancy in the pictures: the orange noose
that officials identified as the one Jeffrey Epstein used to hang himself appears to have hemmed edges and
does not look as if it were cut. Mark Epstein said that seems to conflict with the account from the prison
guard Michael Thomas, who said he cut the body down from the ligature.
“All we’ve heard from the guard is the guard said he cut him down,” said Mark by phone. “If you look
at the picture of the ligature . . . it was not cut and it doesn’t look like it was tied to anything . . . Look at
the angle of the ligature. It was a hemmed edge; it was not cut.”
Autopsy photos also show dried blood on Epstein’s neck surrounding the ligature mark. However,
there does not appear to be blood on the noose in the photos. The discrepancy suggests that this ligature
was incorrectly identified as the object used in Epstein’s death.
Some have speculated that Mark Epstein could have a financial motive for questioning the suicide
ruling, including a wrongful death suit against the government. Dr. Baden disputed this, insisting there is
no lawsuit on the table.
“There’s no money involved with this; there’s no lawsuits involved in this. All that Mark wants to
know is, what’s the accurate cause of death and if indeed his brother committed suicide,” said Baden.
Some of Epstein’s close friends can’t comprehend him committing suicide for a different reason. They
said it would be completely out of character.
“Bullshit. He was murdered,” one close friend who knew him for decades asserted in an interview. “I
can’t imagine that thought of suicide crossing his mind.”
“The man could afford all the lawyers in the world. The day before that suicide, he had met with his
lawyers for eight hours,” said the friend. “Those lawyers were certainly giving hope for what he could
do, but more importantly, he knew he could buy his way out of a lot of shit.”
NEXT
What Happened
The Possibilities
notes
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