U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, N.Y., on Wednesday unsealed a handwritten note that Jeffrey Epstein's former cellmate said he found after the financier's first suspected jail suicide attempt in July 2019, releasing a document that had sat in a courthouse vault for nearly five years.
Karas did not rule on whether Epstein wrote the note. The judge found only that the document was a judicial record subject to the public's right of access, after The New York Times petitioned last week to unseal it as part of an unrelated criminal case.
What the note says
The note, written on a yellow legal pad, was submitted in the case of Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer serving a life sentence who shared a cell with Epstein for about two weeks in July 2019. Tartaglione has said he discovered the note tucked in a book after Epstein was found on July 23, 2019, with a strip of bedsheet around his neck.
"They investigated me for month -- found nothing!!!" the note reads, according to PBS NewsHour. "It is a treat to be able to choose" the "time to say goodbye," it continues. "Watcha want me to do -- Bust out cryin!!" The note ends, "NO FUN," and "NOT WORTH IT!!" with both phrases underlined.
Why it surfaced now
Few people knew the note existed until Tartaglione mentioned it on a podcast last year. The document was not cited in the federal reports examining Epstein's death and was absent from the millions of Epstein-related files the Justice Department has released since Congress in November ordered a full disclosure, Al Jazeera reported.
Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, and federal reviews faulted jail staff for sleeping and browsing the internet instead of conducting required checks.
Counterpoint
The note's provenance remains contested. Karas's order did not authenticate the handwriting, and the document never reached the federal investigators who reconstructed Epstein's final weeks. Tartaglione, who is serving four consecutive life sentences for drug-related murders, is the sole witness to its discovery. Right-of-center outlets covered Wednesday's release in headline form but did not produce body reporting that surfaced an additional substantive objection by press time.
The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday questioned Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about his ties to Epstein, the latest in a string of subpoenas issued as lawmakers pursue their own investigation into the financier's network.