A cellmate of Jeffrey Epstein reportedly found the convicted sex offender’s apparent suicide note in late July 2019, weeks before his death.
The revelation, reported by the New York Times on Thursday, comes nearly seven years after Epstein’s suicide in August 2019.
In interviews with the newspaper, Nicholas Tartaglione said he found the note after Epstein was found unresponsive in his jail cell with red marks on his neck. The high-profile inmate alleged that Tartaglione attacked him, which the cellmate denied. Epstein was ultimately placed on suicide watch.
Sometime in the four days after the possible suicide attempt on July 23, Tartaglione discovered the piece of yellow paper tucked inside a graphic novel.
“I opened the book to read and there it was,” he said.
The purported suicide note, according to Tartaglione, read: “What do you want me to do, bust out crying? Time to say goodbye.”
The New York Times says there is no copy of the note found in the publicly available Epstein files on the Justice Department’s website. But there is a record of its existence in a two-page report chronicling events before and after Epstein’s death on Aug. 10, 2019.
In the report, Tartaglione told his lawyer about finding the note. He tried retrieving the note from his jail cell, but a prison guard said no. The lawyer then instructed his client to give the note to another lawyer who arrived later that day.
The lawyers unsuccessfully tried to authenticate the note twice in the coming days. The document was later authenticated in late 2019 or early 2020.
Each person mentioned in the report is identified by their initials: “JE” for Jeffrey Epstein and “NT” for Nicholas Tartaglione.
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The note itself is kept safe inside a vault at a New York courthouse. The New York Times asked the judge of that court to unseal the note on Thursday. A DOJ spokesperson told the newspaper that the agency had never seen the note in its possession.
Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide by the New York City medical examiner, which the DOJ corroborated last July.
