Jeffrey Epstein’s handwritten ‘suicide note’ finally made public
A rumoured ‘suicide note’ found by Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate has been made public after being locked in a courtroom for five years.
The note, found by Epstein’s former cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione, had been sealed and locked in a courthouse vault for nearly five years as part of an unrelated legal dispute.
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 Epstein’s cellmate.
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.
The messages scribbled on it, allegedly by Epstein, are harrowing.
‘They investigated me for a 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!!’
The note concludes: ‘NO FUN,’ with those words underlined. ‘NOT WORTH IT!!’
In interviews by phone from a federal prison in California, Tartaglione told how he found it.
In the month before his death, Epstein was moved to a different part of the jail and briefly placed on suicide watch.
Around then, Tartaglione said, he found the note in his cell, tucked into a graphic novel.
‘I opened the book to read, and there it was,’ Tartaglione claimed. He said it was a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad.
‘My lawyers at the time wanted to make sure, you know, I didn’t write it,’ Tartaglione said in a July 2025 interview, adding they had ‘handwriting experts’ examine the note.
Epstein’s brother Mark has long claimed Jeffrey was ‘murdered’ and then ‘covered up’.
An expert Mark hired to attend the autopsy also said his death looked ‘more consistent with homicidal strangulation’.
Documents and reports have also shown that prison guards failed to conduct checks on the night of Jeffrey’s death and that the camera system in the unit was also down.
On the night she was meant to be checking on Jeffrey every 30 minutes, guard Tova Noel, 37, reportedly slept on the job, browsed furniture online, and even searched ‘latest on Epstein in jail’ less than an hour before the sex offender took his own life in August 2019.
Jeffrey Epstein’s brother says bombshell new study will prove he didn’t kill himself
Epstein’s brother Mark has long claimed Jeffrey was ‘murdered’ and then it was ‘covered up’.
An expert Mark hired to attend the autopsy also said his death looked ‘more consistent with homicidal strangulation’.
The property developer said the findings are due after an independent group of pathologists studied Jeffrey’s autopsy results for months.
Mark spoke out after new reports the guard who found Jeffrey dead received mystery payments, saying the revelations confirmed his suspicions.
Jeffrey was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York on August 10, 2019, while he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
His death was ruled a suicide by the city’s chief medical examiner and the FBI said in 2023 there was no criminality involved.
However Mark – who spoke to his brother over the phone just a month earlier – has long since claimed Jeffrey was ‘murdered’ and then ‘covered up’.
An expert he hired to attend the autopsy has also said his death looked ‘more consistent with homicidal strangulation’.
Mark is saying a group of expert forensic pathologists are on the verge of publishing a report that refutes the ruling Jeffrey died by suicide.
The brother told Metro: ‘I’m led to believe it will be a game changer. Stay tuned.’
He said the independent group have been ‘properly studying the autopsy results for months’, comparing the evidence against autopsies of suicides and murders.
Mark said that homicide investigators were not part of the panel but hinted that murder detectives ‘should be called in after the report comes out’.
The younger brother – who gave the panel Jeffrey’s autopsy reports – added: ‘They are not doing this on my behalf. I am not paying for this.’
The study appears to have been completed and is being checked by other expert pathologists.
Mark said: ‘Their report is properly being peer reviewed as any good scientific study should be before being published.
‘They are waiting, and so am I, for the review to be completed before they publish the results.’
The younger brother said he has not seen the study and refused to divulge the names of the experts conducting the review in case they are targeted by the media.
Mark teased the new bombshell report just as the spotlight turned to the prison guard who discovered Jeffrey’s body.
Tova Noel was one of two workers at New York’s Metropolitan Correction Center who faced criminal charges for fabricating records to show they had checked Jeffrey the night before he had died.
Newly released documents show that Noel received a mystery payment just days before the disgraced financier took his own life in his cell.
On the night she was meant to be checking on Jeffrey every 30 minutes, Noel, 37, reportedly slept on the job, browsed furniture online and even searched ‘latest on Epstein in jail’ less than an hour before the sex offender committed suicide in August 2019.
Files show that the prison officer had received a series of 7 cash payments from December 2018 totalling more than $11,000.
Charges against Tova Noel and her colleague Michael Thomas were dropped after the pair agreed to complete 100 hours of community service and cooperate with a Department Of Justice investigation.
Separate reports in the US also reveal that an inmate housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center told the FBI he overheard guards talking about covering up Jeffrey’s death on the morning he died.
In an interview with the FBI published in the Epstein Files, the inmate recalled a guard saying ‘If he is dead, we’re going to cover it up and he’s going to have an alibi,’ according to Detroit News
Responding to these new revelations, Mark said: ‘It all just bolsters the argument against suicide.
‘If this was a suicide why all the shenanigans, and covert ops. Makes no sense.’
Mark was born a year and a half after Jeffrey in 1954 and went on to become a property developer in New York.
The pair were only occasionally in touch after the death of their mother in 2004.
Mark appears to have been in close quarters with some of his brother’s associates.
He has repeatedly claimed that he once flew on Jeffrey’s private plane with Donald Trump in the late 90s, according to the Independent.
When asked about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Mark said he never met the ex-Prince but knew he and Jeffrey ‘were friends’.
Mark has repeatedly refused to publicly discuss anything other than his brother’s death.
In June 2023, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) published a scathing report that oulined ‘numerous and serious failures’ by the Bureau of Prisons leading up to Jeffrey’s suicide.
It complained that multiple prison staff failed to check on the disgraced financier in the hours before his death, despite him being on suicide watch.
Staff at the Manhattan jail also failed to assign Epstein a fellow inmate in his cell, the report found.
Despite the list of failures, the watchdog concluded that there was no evidence to contradict the FBI’s finding that there was no crime involved in his death.
The report stated: ‘All staff members who were interviewed by the OIG said they did not know of any information suggesting that Epstein’s cause of death was something other than suicide.
‘Likewise, none of the interviewed inmates provided any credible information that Epstein’s cause of death was something other than suicide.’
Mark is not the only person to have spoken out recently about the possibility of Jeffrey Epstein’s death being suspicious. One high-profile name has even gone so far as to say that the disgraced financier is still alive.
Elon Musk’s father says it’s ‘absurd’ to believe Jeffrey Epstein is really dead
The always controversial figure of Errol Musk – father of Elon – has resurfaced with another eyebrow-raising take. This time the South African’s claiming that Jeffrey Epstein is still alive.
The 79-year-old made the comments during a primetime interview on Russian state television.
Asked, for some reason, about Epstein, Errol dismissed the official account of his death outright, leaning into long-running conspiracy theories about what exactly happened to the paedophile financier.
Convicted sex offender Epstein was found dead in his New York prison cell on August 10, 2019. He was, at the time, awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in a case that drew global attention and endless – ongoing – scrutiny.
Epstein’s death was formally ruled a suicide by the city’s chief medical examiner. Questions about the circumstances have continued to circulate in the years since.
‘In my opinion, it’s absurd to think that he is dead. It’s ridiculous,’ Errol said.
The line didn’t land all that well, drawing a number of groans from the studio audience. That didn’t slow him down, though.
‘The prison guards have come out to say that he was swapped out the night before he was supposed to commit suicide,’ he continued.
He then doubled down even further, adding: ‘The cameras were off at the wrong time, the guards went to sleep.’
He then concluded: ‘It’s absolutely absurd to think that this man is dead. He’s alive and well.’
It’s a familiar line of thinking in conspiracy circles. One that’s cropped up repeatedly since the news of Epstein’s death hit, alongside others.
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