The New York Times, finally, got around to investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s death. Their work was so bad that they should not have bothered.

It was a hit job.

A well-executed, professional media execution. The entire investigation by the New York Times of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in prison promised so much but delivered so little.

Why would the Times print such a hatchet job?

Well, they wouldn’t they…

This is a media outlet that has spent the last six years rubbishing any skepticism about the verdict of suicide. They claimed that anyone who had doubts that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself must be a “conspiracy theorist”.
Under those circumstances it would take NY Times journalists of exceptional valour to be able to conduct an investigation that proved their colleagues wrong.

You see similar issues in Cold Case investigations by the same police unit. The “Who are you, smart ass, to come in and show the world I was wrong?” factor that demonstrates the need for an independent team of investigators to overturn wrongful convictions or discover solutions to unsolved murders.

The second issue is more cultural. The Sulzberger Family, who own the New York Times, are rich, upper-class, white Jewish establishment of New York. These were Epstein’s people. Note – unlike other independent journalists I am not claiming that the Sulzbergers were connected to Jeffrey Epstein. What I am saying is that there is a social class issue. It is like asking upper-class, English journalists at The Times or Daily Telegraph to investigate fraud among the hat-wearing Ascot set or allegations of abuse at private schools like Harrow or Eton. It is all just so embarrassing when members of the same social class expose each others’ failings. So they tend not to do it.

I write the above not because I necessarily believe Jeffrey Epstein’s death to be murder. I am an investigator: my only desire is to see, finally, a proper investigation into what actually happened to America’s most famous prisoner inside that Manhattan jail but the New York Times’ investigation is very far from a proper investigation.

The paper had, purportedly, assigned four journalists and a team of visual editors to work full-time gathering new material on Epstein’s death. Lets begin by looking at some of the good parts of their investigation before showing their lack-of-follow-through and bizarre failings. But first a clip from the great Mob movie – The Godfather – on the criminal view of ‘hangings in prison’.

The Good That They Do…

The Epstein papers released in late January 2026 had the names of many of the prisoners in Epstein’s jail unit. The Times journalists spoke to some of them. This included one person who, allegedly, talked to Jeffrey Epstein the night of his death. He was in the cell next to Epstein and claimed that he heard someone tearing sheets in the middle of the night. He called out to them and Epstein replied.

Okay…

This is very important. There are a series of questions that are not spelt out like – why didn’t the FBI or any other government investigator interview this inmate and write up his story in the government reports? How did the inmate know that it was Epstein who replied to him? However, let’s put all those questions, which are not answered in the article, aside and concentrate on the major piece of pro-self-harm evidence that The Times journalists worked very hard to obtain: Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide note.

What?!

The Alleged Suicide Note

Yes, if you have not heard this piece of news – it is a big one. Allegedly, Jeffrey Epstein wrote the following note:

“ONLY PAIN To ME & Others in the future. NOT very much fun! Why should people I Lov suffer for my problem. So… Whatcha want me to do? Burst out cryin!!!! Best for all.”

It was discovered by his cellmate, the eventually quadruple convicted murderer Nicholas Tartaglione, tucked into a graphic comic book in their cell. He purportedly kept it for years as evidence to show that he had saved Jeffrey Epstein’s life the night of July 23, 2019 when there was an odd incident at approximately 1:29 a.m. with Epstein being discovered with a plastic tie around his neck.

I could write an entire podcast about this note, but in the end, I think it means very little. Here is why:

1. The provenance is bad. We simply do not know when the note was written or what it was meant to be. We have only Tartaglione’s word that that the note was connected with Epstein. After all, the usual suicide note, if there is one, is not stuck in the leaves of a book, let alone a graphic comic book. This does not mean that the note is not genuine, it just does not show what it is purported to be – a final testament to the world. It could, just as easily, be some random scribblings when Epstein was at a low mental point.
2. Nicholas Tartaglione had every motive to use the note to show that he had not attacked Epstein, as Jeffrey Epstein claimed. Tartaglione is facing a potential death sentence. Anything that can show he is a good guy who stopped a potential suicide will help him in front of a judge.
3. Despite the best spinning efforts of the New York Times and Nicholas Tartaglione, the above note was not necessarily written on the night of July 22/23. The actual note that Epstein did write that night contained references to Emil Zola, the French Jewish army officer who endured years of prison to defend his innocence. It begins “J’accuse…” and ends, “Me/too Jewish-Rich-Politics. Believe the victim = Believe the accuser – CRAZY.” You may not agree with the sentiments but it is not necessarily a sign of self-harm.

The Bad – What The Times Mentioned but Never Followed Up

“The Guards Killed Epstein”

“As they (FBI investigators) toured the SHU, an inmate named Jeffrey Estevez told us, “everybody was screaming, saying: ‘Y’all murdered him! Y’all murdered Epstein!”

There is a specific mention of inmates screaming as the FBI entered the prison unit that the guards had killed Epstein. The Times mentions this story and then never returns to it.

This is unfathomable.

Imagine if the FBI were conducting a Wolf of Wall Street type investigation into a high-level commercial fraud. When they arrive to serve the warrant at the plush offices on Wall Street: the executives come out of their offices and start screaming, “It was our CEO who did the crime. The CEO!” Do you think the FBI would ignore those allegations? Do you think the New York Times journalists would mention an incident like that and then do the journalistic equivalent of a shrugging of their shoulders?

This is class-based media bias. The New York Times simply does not count poor people as having the same weight as rich people. Those prisoners in the MCC were mostly poor, working class people. Some of their were hoodlums, but few of them were rich so The Times just ignores what they have to say. They seem never, at least from what is written in their article, to have asked any of the inmates they interviewed what did the prisoners mean when they shouted “Y’all murdered him…”

“The Most Unusual Hanging Ever…”

With such a botched official investigation – destroyed evidence, no cameras, a disturbed crime scene – the examination of Epstein’s body became hugely important. Only two medical examiners actually looked at his corpse. The government-appointed one who said the evidence was inconclusive and then, a few days later, their boss stepped in and declared the death a suicide. The second medical examiner, hired by Mark Epstein, declared the wounds to be indicative of homicide.

Since then there has been a battle of two-handed forensics “experts” (two-handed from the joke, that no expert who is called into a case, can ever stop saying, “On the other hand…” Editor: Its not that funny, Declan. Get back to the investigation!) all claiming that it was probably suicide based on their understanding of the prison environment or, occasionally, forensic experts who consider that the wounds on Epstein were conclusive evidence of murder. In the New York Times article, they mention the above expert and, again, never return to analyze his statement. Let alone, pick up the material that we have covered in CrimeWaves of wounds on Epstein’s body that were never mentioned in the official report.

The Changing Stories of the Lawyers

Epsteins’ lawyers are portrayed in the New York Times article as largely keeping him company and making sure he did not commit suicide. I am not saying that is not true; but I am saying that marks a huge change from their attitude in August 2019. A week after Epstein was found dead in his cell, his senior lawyer Reid Weingarten pleaded with the judge in the criminal trial to launch an official investigation into Epstein’s death..

David Schoen, another of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers is portrayed as indicating that his death may have been suicide. That would be an 180 degree change! On his interview with us at CrimeWaves, Schoen was adamant that he thought the death was probably murder,

One Word to Damn Them All

The most extraordinary exclusion by the Times journalists is their painstaking and almost useless investigation of Epstein’s days under suicide watch.

To review, on the night of July 22/23, 2019 – Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell with a plastic tie around his neck. He, at first, claimed that he had been attacked by his cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione (see above). Then he changed his story claiming that he “could not remember what happened…”. The context of this change may have been his writing that Tartaglione telling him that if Epstein told the guards that he attacked him, the guards would do nothing.

Epstein then spends several days in the prison’s suicide watch unit. The conditions on this unit are unbelievably harsh. Prisoners sleep on the floor. They are observed 24-hours a day through a plexiglass wall. However, as he is exiting the suicide watch unit, Epstein begs to stay. Why? “Because’ he replies, “He wants to be safe.”

Safe.

That one word dams the entire Times investigation for it contains a whole host of questions their investigation team does not seem to have asked:

“Safe” from what?
“Safe” from whom?
“Safe” from a particular person?
“Safe” from Nicholas Tartaglione, the man who would be convicted of killing people with a plastic tie around their necks (the same thing found on Epstein)?
“Safe” from another inmate?
“Safe” from a potential murder plot?
If he had been kept “safe” in the suicide watch would Jeffrey Epstein he still be alive today?

Unbelievably, the Times team seem to have not considered any of these questions and hurried on to the next section of their “investigation”. I understand that all media people have word counts and space limitations but some of the material that the NY Times left out is extraordinary.

The Unmentioned

The first and most extraordinary omission from The Times investigation is that there is no mention of the prison paperwork that showed there was an extra person on Epstein’s unit the night he died.

What?!

Yes, there is no mention that the official prison record shows that there was an extra person on Epstein’s jail wing from 10:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. the night he died. You would think that such a record would require at least some mention. The Department of Justice investigators spend pages twisting themselves into knots to explain this factor but the Times journalists never even mention it.

The Torture Center

The Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) where Epstein was housed is presented in the Times article as an under-staffed, “dysfunctional” place. It was not. The MCC was an utterly corrupt, torture center. A deliberately maintained hellhole designed to break the inmates.

There were serial sexual abusers, rapists, organized crime-linked drug traffickers, and murderers at the prison – and those were just the guards. The inmates, if they had money, could obtain just about anything they wanted. One expert told the New York Post “there were more phones in the MCC then Best Buy”. A prisoner staged a rap concert from the high-security wing. Another prisoner had a gun. A few days before Epstein’s death, the guards released the wrong prisoner and sent him home with a bus pass.

The level of corruption inside the MCC was extraordinary. At one point, the guards who were aligned with the organized crime mobsters, wrote them letters of reference for their sentence hearing.

The two senior drug traffickers that we spoke to on CrimeWaves both said of all the jails that they were in (and they were in a lot) the MCC was by far the worst.

The prison guards around Epstein were so odd that one of them was receiving tens-of-thousands of dollars in unmarked cash. These deposits were so suspicious that her bank red-flagged them to the FBI investigators. They seemingly never asked her about them.

On Epstein’s final night, he got his guards to give him the unit phone for twenty-two minutes alone in the shower. How does that happen without major corruption?

In short, if you were going to have a murder in a prison, the MCC is the prison that you would choose to do it in.

There is a host of other major factors that The Times investigators passes over: the non-functioning camera system, the fact that any video recordings that do exist in the public realm are copies not the original recordings, the fact that millions of pages of the Epstein File, presumably the most interesting, have still not been released by the Trump Department of Justice. But most seriously of all The Times glosses over the one glaring fact that has emerged from the Epstein papers in the last few months: Jeffrey Epstein was prepared to name names to get himself out of prison.

The Motive for the Killing

This is huge as it gives a lot of powerful people very powerful motives for having Epstein killed.

At that time, the summer of 2019, some of the unknown secrets of Epstein’s class included the sexual trafficking of underage girls with France’s top model agency – whose CEO was arrested after Jeffrey Epstein and whose body was also found dead in prison – to Bill Gates having a sexually transmitted disease to Noam Chomsky phoning Epstein from the President of Brazil’s jail cell to Howard Lutnick, currently Trump’s Secretary of Commerce visiting Epstein’s island, years after Epstein’s conviction for sexual trafficking and discussing his nannies. The list of powerful people who have lost their jobs due to the proximity to Epstein goes from Hollywood super-agents to movie producers to members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to Presidents of international banks to the British Ambassador to Washington to Prince Andrew.

I am not claiming that anyone of those specific people arranged for Jeffrey Epstein’s murder but I am saying that was an extraordinary number of powerful, rich people with an interest in having Epstein silenced permanently.

It is a Conspiracy Theory

Much of the Times inadequate investigation is spent dismissing “conspiracy theorists”. The implication is that only true journalists like the New York Times team can sort out the ‘truth’. The public must be protected from themselves. We are all too gullible and easily led by “misinformation” and Internet tales. This arrogant, nose-stuck-in-the-air attitude disregards the value of a disinterested public helping to solve mysteries that have baffled ‘experts’. The public has a long, noble tradition of solving intractable problems from the first edition of the Oxford English dictionary to the Netflix series ‘Don’t F*** with Cats”.

Specifically in the Jeffrey Epsten case, it was “Internet conspiracy theorists” who discovered that the photo of the cloth noose that Epstein had purportedly used to hang himself was the wrong noose. The same theorists saw another cloth that could have been better for this task – but the FBI had destroyed it in their official investigation.

Here is the truth the Times journalists have not understood. There is a conspiracy theory around the Epstein Case. It depends on half-truths and wild, seemingly impossible tales and improbable connections. It is the official story of his death.

If you found this article interesting – please don’t forget to comment, like, subscribe or follow – it is massively important. Thank you.