A federal judge has released a suicide note purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein that was sealed for years as part of the criminal case of his cellmate.
“They investigated me for months — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins, adding that the result were charges going back many years.
“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continued.
“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the note 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, N.Y., who oversaw the cellmate’s case. The judge acted after The New York Times petitioned the court last Thursday to unseal the document and published an article in which Mr. Tartaglione described the note and how it came into his possession.
The Times has not authenticated 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 spokeswoman from the Justice Department said the agency had never seen it.)
The search did turn up a cryptic two-page chronology that described how the note became caught up in Mr. Tartaglione’s complicated legal case. The chronology said that Mr. Tartaglione’s lawyers authenticated the note, though it did not explain how.
Mr. Tartaglione, a former police officer in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., shared a cell with Mr. Epstein while awaiting trial in a quadruple murder case. He told The Times in recent phone interviews from a California prison that he found the note in a graphic novel after Mr. Epstein was taken out of their cell after the apparent suicide attempt.
“I opened the book to read and there it was,” Mr. Tartaglione said. It was written on a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad, he said.
The New York City medical examiner ruled Mr. Epstein’s death a suicide. In the years since, revelations of security lapses inside the jail have spawned endless theories about how Mr. Epstein died and whether he was murdered.
When jail officials asked Mr. Epstein about red marks on his neck after the incident in July, he first said that Mr. Tartaglione had attacked him and that he was not suicidal. Mr. Tartaglione has long denied assaulting Mr. Epstein, who later told jail officials he “never had any issues” with his cellmate.
Mr. Tartaglione said he gave the note to his lawyers because he believed it could have been helpful if Mr. Epstein continued to claim that he had tried to hurt him. Mr. Tartaglione was convicted in 2023 and is now serving four life sentences. He has maintained his innocence and has appealed his conviction.
The note apparently became part of a drawn-out legal dispute among Mr. Tartaglione’s lawyers. Documents related to the conflict were placed under a court seal to protect attorney-client privilege, the filings say.
Before unsealing the note, Judge Karas asked the parties in the case to provide their views on The Times’s request that the materials be made public. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which prosecuted Mr. Tartaglione, did not contest the note’s release. In a letter to the judge, 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 are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
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