A couple of weeks before Jeffrey Epstein took his own life, he sat in the corner of his Manhattan prison cell with his hands over his ears, desperately trying to block out the sound of a broken toilet that didn’t it stopped working.
According to jail authorities, the man was agitated and unable to sleep. He called himself a “coward” and complained that he was struggling to adjust to prison life after being arrested in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges.
suicide watch
Epstein was under psychological supervision at the time for a suicide attempt a few days earlier that left his neck bruised and scraped.
However, after a 31-hour stint on suicide watch, the disgraced businessman insisted he was not suicidal, telling a prison psychologist that he had a “wonderful life” and that “it would be crazy” to end it.
As of August 10, 2019, Epstein was lying dead inside his cell.
Nearly four years later, the AP managed to obtain more than 4,000 pages of documents linked to Epstein’s death from the Federal Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom of Information Act.
In them, there is a very accurate psychological reconstruction of the incidents that led to Epstein’s suicide, as well as his health history, internal agency reports, emails, memos, and other records.
Specifically, the documents offer the most comprehensive account to that date of Epstein’s arrest and death, and its chaotic aftermath. The records help dispel conspiracy theories surrounding his suicide, and highlight fundamental failings at the Bureau of Prisons, including severe understaffing and workers cutting corners, leading to the death of the defendant.
Letter to Larry Nassar
The reports provide a new window into Epstein’s behavior in his 36 days in prison, including his unreported attempt to email high-profile pedophile Larry Nassar, a former USA Gymnastics team doctor accused of sexually abuse dozens of athletes.
The letter Epstein sent to Nassar was returned to sender in the jail’s mailroom weeks after the tycoon’s death. “It looked like he mailed it and they sent it back to him,” the detective who found the letter told a prison official via email. “I’m not sure if I should open it or if we should hand it over to someone.”
The night before the death of the disgraced businessman, he excused himself from a meeting with his lawyers to make an alleged phone call to his mother, who had already died 15 years ago at that time.
Negligence by two officers
Epstein’s suicide increased scrutiny of the Bureau of Prisons and led the agency to close the Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2021. It also spurred an AP investigation that uncovered major, previously unreported problems within the agency.
An internal memo, sent after Epstein’s death, blamed the prison’s problems on “severely reduced staffing levels, inadequate training or lack of training, follow-up and supervision.”
The document details the steps the Bureau of Prisons took to remedy the lapses exposed by the mogul’s suicide, including requiring supervisors to review video from security cameras to ensure officers have made cell checks. necessary.
For his part, Martin Weinberg, Epstein’s lawyer, said that the people detained at the facility endured “medieval conditions of confinement to which no American defendant should have been subjected.”
“It’s sad, it’s tragic that it took this type of event for the Bureau of Prisons to finally shut down this sorry institution,” Weinberg said.
Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, workers tasked with protecting Epstein the night of his death, were accused of lying in jail records to make it appear they had conducted checks before finding him dead.
Prosecutors argued that the two were sitting at their desks 15 feet from Epstein’s cell, buying furniture and motorcycles online and walking through the unit’s common area, instead of making their rounds every 30 minutes.
For two hours, the two subjects appear to have been asleep, according to the indictment. Noel and Thomas confessed to forging the registry entries, but avoided jail time thanks to a deal with federal prosecutors.
More than 10 sexual partners in five years
Epstein arrived at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on July 6, 2019, and spent 22 hours with the general population before being transferred to the special housing unit “due to the significant increase in media coverage and awareness of his notoriety among the population.” recluse”, according to the psychological reconstruction of her death.
The businessman said he was upset at having to wear an orange jumpsuit like the other inmates and complained that he was treated like a “bad boy” despite behaving well. He requested a brown uniform for his almost daily visits with his lawyers.
Likewise, in an initial examination, the 66-year-old subject stated that he had had more than 10 female sexual partners in the previous five years. In the medical records it could be seen that he suffered from sleep apnea, constipation, hypertension, lower back pain and prediabetes, and was also treated for chlamydia.
Epstein made some attempts to adjust to the prison environment, the records say. He signed up for a kosher meal and told jail officials, through his attorney, that he wanted permission to exercise outdoors.
Two days before he was found dead, he purchased $73.85 items from the jail station, including an AM/FM radio and headphones. $566 remained in his account at the time of his death.
bail denied
Epstein’s outlook worsened after a judge denied him bail on July 18, 2019, raising the prospect of remaining jailed until trial. Had he been found guilty, he would have faced 45 years in prison. Four days later Epstein was discovered with a sheet tied around his neck on the cell floor.
The tycoon survived, his injuries did not require treatment. He was placed on suicide watch and subsequently under psychiatric observation. Prison officers noted in the records that they observed him, “sitting on the edge of the bed, lost in thought of him” and sitting “with his head against the wall.”
On the other hand, the man made his frustration known about the noise of the jail and his lack of sleep. In his first weeks at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Epstein did not have his sleep apnea device, then the toilet in his cell broke down.
“He was still left in the same cell with a broken toilet,” the jail’s head psychologist wrote in an email the next day. “Please take him to the next cell when he returns from legal, as the toilet is still not working.”
Just days before her suicide, a federal judge unsealed nearly 2,000 pages of documents in a sexual assault lawsuit against her. Following the disclosure, prison officials said they watched Epstein’s exalted status erode further.
The aforementioned, along with the lack of significant interpersonal connections and “the idea of potentially spending his life in prison were likely contributing factors to Mr. Epstein’s suicide,” authorities wrote.
Keep reading:
- New files link Jeffrey Epstein with Irina Shayk and Chris Rock
- Jeffrey Epstein threatened to expose an alleged extramarital affair of Bill Gates
- Former mentor of suicidal pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his home at the age of 77