This week a judge in the Southern District of New York unsealed what appears to be a suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein. The note is unsigned and as yet unauthenticated. Many have immediately declared it a fake. But I’ve spent hundreds of hours combing through the Epstein files as a journalist, and there is strong evidence for its authenticity.
First, though: How did this note only come to light now? The pivotal character in this story is Epstein’s original cellmate at the Manhattan Correctional Center, Nicholas Tartaglione. The ex-cop-turned-steroid-dealer and animal rescuer was awaiting trial for quadruple murder. In the early morning of July 23, 2019, Tartaglione began banging on his cell door to summon the guards. They found Epstein unresponsive on the floor with a makeshift noose around his neck.
Under Trump, the Justice Department’s credibility is negligible.
Epstein initially claimed that his cellmate tried to strangle him. This was a dubious allegation, given that it was Tartaglione who yelled for help. Epstein may have made the accusation against his cellmate in order to keep himself off suicide watch and dodge a disciplinary write-up for self-harm. He almost immediately backtracked, however, and said he didn’t remember what happened. Epstein later assured prison staff that he didn’t feel threatened by Tartaglione and that he was happy to continue being housed with him. He was moved anyway.
Last year, Tartaglione told podcaster Jessica Reed Kraus that he found the note tucked in a book shortly after Epstein’s suicide attempt and handed it over to his lawyer, who used it as evidence of good conduct in Tartaglione’s trial. Because the note was subject to attorney-client privilege, the judge in the case sealed the record. He unsealed it after lawyers for The New York Times successfully argued that Tartaglione nullified the privilege by describing the note on Kraus’ podcast.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan prosecuted Tartaglione, and many observers are rightly skeptical about anything involving Epstein and this Justice Department. Under President Donald Trump, the department’s credibility is negligible in light of its outrageous foot-dragging on releasing the Epstein files and its frantic attempts to shield the president from the fallout. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, was dispatched to interview Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell last summer. Thereafter, Maxwell was transferred to a cushy prison with yoga and puppies after she said she never saw Trump or Epstein do anything inappropriate.
While we can’t be sure the note is legit until the forensic document examiners weigh in, to me it’s vintage Epstein. For one thing, it starts with a rant about how prosecutors investigated him for “NOTHING!!!” The insistence that the charges against him were baseless and that the government was persecuting him — that’s Jeff, all right.
Furthermore, in poring through the Epstein files, I’ve gotten to know the sex offender’s writing better than I ever wanted to. The handwriting is very similar to a note found in Epstein’s cell after his death. Both notes include the all-caps phrase “NO FUN” and a liberal sprinkling of double exclamation marks.
Even the note’s most distinctive line strengthens the case for authenticity: “It is a treat to choose my time to say goodbye. Watcha want me to do? — Bust out cryin!!”
The latter sentence caught the attention of skeptics. “We’re talking about a highly educated individual,” Fox News correspondent Kevin Corke told host Laura Ingraham. “Would he say that? I’m not so certain.”
If the note was forged, the forger would have to know this remarkably obscure reference.
Actually, Epstein was a college dropout whose default email style can charitably be described as a half-literate stream of consciousness. Corke is picking up on something important, however: The words are from someone else. And the Justice Department’s Epstein files have the answer.
The files reveal that Epstein used the obscure “cryin” catchphrase in emails to his brother and his childhood friend. It’s an apparent reference to a Little Rascals short film from 1931, in which one of the Little Rascals, a Black child named Stymie, brushes off his friend Farina’s grief that he is about to be shipped off to an orphanage. In both emails, Epstein used it to chide the recipients for getting sentimental about something. It sounds alien to Epstein because it’s a Hollywood screenwriter’s take on African American Vernacular English. But if the note was forged, the forger would have to know this remarkably obscure reference.
And if it’s a forgery, who forged it? Tartaglione’s lawyer insists the note is real, but his client might have manufactured it as insurance against an attempted murder accusation from Epstein. Let’s be clear that Tartaglione’s credibility is negligible. He was convicted of four counts of murder. He maintains his innocence, even though the victims were kidnapped from his brother’s bar and the corpses were found in a mass grave on his property. We don’t know if Tartaglione ever saw Epstein’s handwriting, but even if he did and he’s a very proficient forger, that still wouldn’t explain how he’d know about Epstein’s Little Rascals fandom.
Some conspiracists insinuate that the federal government forged the note to help cover up the murder they were planning for Epstein. We know the current Justice Department couldn’t have forged the note because Tartaglione’s lawyer says he received it in 2019 and entered it into the legal record prior to Trump’s second term. If the government went to all the trouble of forging it years ago, why not use it at the time to quiet rumors that Epstein was murdered? If they forged it, they knew it existed and they could have gotten ahold of it anytime. The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General included Tartaglione as a source in its 2023 report on Epstein’s death. Yet it didn’t cite the note in the report. Instead, the note was produced by the trial judge after a New York Times reporter heard about it on a podcast and asked to have it unsealed. The timeline doesn’t fit the conspiratorial interpretation.
The timeline, phrasing and handwriting all point toward the authenticity of this note. But we can’t be 100% sure. What we can be sure of is that Epstein was a serial sex offender whose wealth allowed him to avoid accountability for years. Years after his death, a full accounting remains elusive. And his victims are still waiting for justice.
Lindsay Beyerstein is an investigative journalist in Brooklyn, New York. She writes a weekly column for The Editorial Board and is working on a book about conspiracy theories and American politics. Follow her on Bluesky.