A federal judge has been petitioned by a legal team to unseal a purported suicide note written by Jeffrey Epstein, a document that has remained hidden inside a New York courthouse for nearly seven years. The note was not included in a trove of Epstein-related documents released by the Department of Justice in the past year.
The note was written in July 2019, after Epstein was found unresponsive with a strip of cloth around his neck in his Manhattan jail cell. Epstein, who was in federal custody awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, survived the incident but weeks later was found dead in his jail cell. His death was ruled a suicide.
When jail officials asked Epstein about red marks on his neck after the July incident, he told them that his cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, had attacked him and that he was not suicidal.
Tartaglione, a former police officer serving four life sentences after a 2023 conviction for quadruple homicide, has long denied assaulting Epstein.
The note’s existence has long remained largely out of public view. It was turned over to the court and sealed by U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas, a George W. Bush appointee, as part of Tartaglione’s criminal case, raising questions about why a potentially significant piece of evidence was not part of official investigations into Epstein’s death.
The legal team reported that it had not seen the note among millions of documents released by the Department of Justice as directed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. A Department of Justice spokeswoman said the agency had not seen the document either despite an exhaustive effort to collect all records in its possession, including those from the Bureau of Prisons and the Office of the Inspector General.
Tartaglione told a reporter he found the note tucked inside a book in their jail cell. He described it as a piece of yellow legal paper and said that investigators had looked into Epstein for many months and “found nothing.” He stated the message continued along the lines of, “What do you want me to do, bust out crying? Time to say goodbye.”
The note’s authenticity was examined by Tartaglione’s legal team. A two-page chronology included among documents released by the Department of Justice indicated that the note became entangled in legal disputes among Tartaglione’s attorneys, leading a judge to take possession and seal related records.
The chronology stated that Tartaglione told his attorney about the note on July 27, 2019, four days after Epstein was found with marks on his neck. Over the following days, Tartaglione’s attorneys tried multiple times to authenticate the note but could not. The note was later authenticated by early January 2020.
The chronology noted that it is unclear who wrote the document and why. Documents released by the Department of Justice indicated that the note was not referenced in an inspector general’s report on Epstein’s death, which documented significant security failures at the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center but upheld the medical examiner’s ruling that Epstein died by suicide.
Epstein’s death at age 66 has fueled widespread scrutiny and speculation, driven by the security lapses and his connections to high-profile individuals. The existence of such a note, if authenticated and released, could provide new insight into Epstein’s state of mind in the weeks before his death.
Earlier this week, an independent agency under the legislative branch announced it would review the Department of Justice’s handling of the Epstein documents after a bipartisan group of senators raised concerns that the Department of Justice violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The lawmakers reportedly alleged that the Department of Justice had violated the law by redacting the names of powerful people who appear in the files.
Michael Katz is a reporter with over 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
