In the weeks leading up to his death by suicide, billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein contacted another disgraced abuser: Larry Nassar, the US gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing dozens of athletes.
The letter is among newly discovered records of Epstein’s stay at the Metropolitan Correctional Center following his July 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.
Epstein’s letter to Nassar was found returned to sender in the prison mailroom weeks after Epstein’s death.
“It looks like he mailed it and it was returned to him,” the investigator who found the letter told a prison official via email. “I don’t know if I should open it or should we hand it to someone?”
The recordings depict an Epstein in the corner of his Manhattan jail cell, his hands over his ears, desperate to drown out the sound of the toilet that keeps running.
In the weeks leading up to his death by suicide, billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein contacted another disgraced abuser: Larry Nassar, the US gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing dozens of athletes.
The letter is among newly discovered records of Epstein’s stay at the Metropolitan Correctional Center following his July 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges. Epstein’s letter to Nassar was found returned to sender in the prison’s mailroom weeks after Epstein’s death
Epstein was restless and unable to sleep, prison officials observed. He called himself a “coward” and complained of struggling to adjust to life behind bars – his life of luxury reduced to a cage of concrete and steel.
The disgraced financier was under psychological observation at the time for a suicide attempt days earlier which left him with bruises and abrasions on his neck.
Yet even after 31 hours on suicide watch, Epstein insisted he was not suicidal, telling a prison psychologist he had a ‘wonderful life’ and would ‘be crazy’ to end it.
On August 10, 2019, Epstein was dead.
Nearly four years later, the AP obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents related to Epstein’s death from the Federal Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom of Information Act.
They include a detailed psychological reconstruction of the events leading up to Epstein’s suicide, as well as his medical history, internal agency reports, emails, memos and other documents.
Taken together, the documents the AP obtained on Thursday provide the most comprehensive account yet of Epstein’s detention and death, and its chaotic aftermath.
The files help dispel the many conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein’s suicide, highlighting how fundamental failings in the Bureau of Prisons – including severe staffing shortages and employees taking shortcuts – contributed to the death of Epstein. ‘Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein appears in court in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 30, 2008
They shed new light on the federal prisons agency’s confused response after Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the now closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
In an email, a prosecutor involved in Epstein’s criminal case complained about the lack of information from the Bureau of Prisons in the critical hours after his death, writing that it was “frankly incredible” that the agency issues public press releases “before telling us basic information so that we can pass it on to his attorneys who can pass it on to his family.
In another email, a senior Bureau of Prisons official made a bogus suggestion to the agency’s director that reporters should have paid prison workers to get information about Epstein’s death because they reported details of the agency’s failings – questioning the ethics of journalists and agency employees.
The letter itself was not among the documents given to the AP.
The day before Epstein died, he excused himself from a meeting with his lawyers to make a phone call to his family.
According to a memo from a unit official, Epstein told a prison worker that he was calling his mother, who had been dead for 15 years at the time.
Epstein’s death exert more control on the Bureau of Prisons and led the agency to close the metropolitan correctional center in 2021.
He sparked an AP investigation which exposed deep and previously unreported problems at the agency, the largest in the Justice Department with more than 30,000 staff, 158,000 inmates and an annual budget of $8 billion.
An internal memo, undated but sent after Epstein’s death, attributed the prison’s problems to “seriously reduced staffing levels, inadequate or lack of training, and monitoring and surveillance”.
The memo also details steps the Bureau of Prisons has taken to address the failings exposed by Epstein’s suicide, including requiring supervisors to review surveillance video to ensure officers are carrying out checks. of cells required.
Epstein’s attorney, Martin Weinberg, said those held at the facility suffered “medieval conditions of confinement to which no American defendant should have been subjected”.
“It’s sad, it’s tragic, that it took this kind of event to finally cause the Bureau of Prisons to shut down this regrettable institution,” Weinberg said Thursday in a phone interview.
The workers in charge of guarding Epstein the night he killed himself, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were charged with lying on prison records to give the impression that they had carried out the required checks before Epstein was found dead.
Epstein’s cellmate did not return after a court hearing the day before, and prison officials did not pair another prisoner with him, leaving him alone.
Prosecutors alleged they sat at their desk just 15 feet from Epstein’s cell, bought furniture and motorbikes online and wandered around the unit’s common area instead of making the required rounds every 30 minutes.
For a period of two hours, both appeared to have slept, according to their indictment.
Noel and Thomas admitted to falsifying diary entries, but avoided jail time as part of a deal with federal prosecutors.
Copies of some of those diaries were included among the documents released on Thursday, with the guards’ signatures redacted.
Another investigation, led by the Inspector General of the Ministry of Justice, is still ongoing.
Epstein arrived at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on July 6, 2019.
He spent 22 hours in the general population of the prison before authorities moved him to the special housing unit “due to the significant increase in media coverage and awareness of his notoriety among the population. prison”, according to the psychological reconstruction of his death.
Epstein later said he was upset that he had to wear an orange jumpsuit provided to inmates in the Special Housing Unit and complained that he was treated like a ‘bad guy’ despite his good behavior behind bars.
He requested a maroon uniform for his almost daily visits with his lawyers.
During an initial health check, the 66-year-old said he had had more than 10 female sexual partners in the previous five years.
Medical records showed he suffered from sleep apnea, constipation, hypertension, lower back pain and pre-diabetes and had previously been treated for chlamydia.
Epstein made some attempts to adjust to his prison environment, records show.
He signed up for a kosher meal and told prison officials, through his lawyer, that he wanted permission to exercise outside.
Two days before he was found dead, Epstein purchased $73.85 worth of items from the prison commissioner, including an AM/FM radio and headphones. He had $566 left in his account when he died.
Epstein’s outlook soured when a judge denied him bail on July 18, 2019, suggesting he would remain locked up until trial and possibly longer.
If convicted, he faces up to 45 years in prison. Four days later, Epstein was found on the floor of his cell with a strip of sheet around his neck.
Epstein survived. His injuries did not require going to the hospital. He was placed under suicide watch and later under psychiatric observation.
Prison officers noted in logbooks that they observed him, “sitting on the edge of the bed, lost in thought” and sitting “with his head against the wall”.
Epstein expressed his frustration with the prison noise and his lack of sleep. His first few weeks at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Epstein did not have his sleep apnea breathing machine he used. Then the toilet in his cell started acting up.
“He was still in the same cell with a broken toilet,” the prison’s chief psychologist wrote in an email the next day. “Please move him to the next cell when he comes back from legality, because the toilet still isn’t working.”
The day before Epstein died, a federal judge unsealed around 2,000 pages of documents in a sex abuse trial against him. This development, prison officials observed, further eroded Epstein’s high status.
That, combined with a lack of important interpersonal relationships and “the thought of potentially spending life in prison, were likely contributing factors to Mr. Epstein’s suicide,” officials wrote.
