A federal choose has launched a suicide word purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein that was sealed for years as a part of the legal case of his cellmate.
“They investigated me for months — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the word begins, including that the outcome had been expenses going again a few years.
“It’s a deal with to have the ability to select one’s time to say goodbye,” the word continued.
“Watcha need me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the word reads.
“NO FUN,” it concludes, with these phrases underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”
Mr. Epstein’s cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, mentioned he found the word in July 2019 after Mr. Epstein was discovered unresponsive with a strip of fabric wrapped round his neck. Mr. Epstein survived that incident, however he was found dead weeks later at age 66 within the now shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Middle in Decrease Manhattan.
The word was made public on Wednesday by Choose Kenneth M. Karas of Federal District Courtroom in White Plains, N.Y., who oversaw the cellmate’s case. The choose acted after The New York Occasions petitioned the court final Thursday to unseal the doc and published an article through which Mr. Tartaglione described the word and the way it got here into his possession.
The Occasions has not authenticated the word, which was positioned on the courtroom docket Wednesday night.
The doc remained hidden from public view even because the Justice Division launched hundreds of thousands of pages of paperwork associated to Mr. Epstein in a transfer of unprecedented transparency. The Occasions searched these data and didn’t discover a copy of the word. (A spokeswoman from the Justice Division mentioned the company had by no means seen it.)
The search did flip up a cryptic two-page chronology that described how the word grew to become caught up in Mr. Tartaglione’s sophisticated authorized case. The chronology mentioned that Mr. Tartaglione’s attorneys authenticated the word, although it didn’t clarify how.
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Mr. Tartaglione, a former police officer in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., shared a cell with Mr. Epstein whereas awaiting trial in a quadruple murder case. He advised The Occasions in current telephone interviews from a California jail that he discovered the word in a graphic novel after Mr. Epstein was taken out of their cell after the obvious suicide try.
“I opened the ebook to learn and there it was,” Mr. Tartaglione mentioned. It was written on a chunk of yellow paper ripped from a authorized pad, he mentioned.
The New York Metropolis medical expert ruled Mr. Epstein’s death a suicide. Within the years since, revelations of safety lapses contained in the jail have spawned infinite theories about how Mr. Epstein died and whether or not he was murdered.
When jail officers requested Mr. Epstein about purple marks on his neck after the incident in July, he first mentioned that Mr. Tartaglione had attacked him and that he was not suicidal. Mr. Tartaglione has lengthy denied assaulting Mr. Epstein, who later advised jail officers he “by no means had any points” along with his cellmate.
Mr. Tartaglione mentioned he gave the word to his attorneys as a result of he believed it may have been useful if Mr. Epstein continued to assert that he had tried to harm him. Mr. Tartaglione was convicted in 2023 and is now serving 4 life sentences. He has maintained his innocence and has appealed his conviction.
The word apparently grew to become a part of a drawn-out authorized dispute amongst Mr. Tartaglione’s attorneys. Paperwork associated to the battle had been positioned beneath a courtroom seal to guard attorney-client privilege, the filings say.
Earlier than unsealing the word, Choose Karas requested the events within the case to supply their views on The Occasions’s request that the supplies be made public. The U.S. lawyer’s workplace in Manhattan, which prosecuted Mr. Tartaglione, didn’t contest the word’s launch. In a letter to the choose, the prosecutors wrote that “there seems to be a powerful public curiosity within the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s dying.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
If you’re having ideas of suicide, name or textual content 988 to succeed in the 988 Suicide and Disaster Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a listing of extra sources.
