Epstein left – From his shock-filled arrest at Teterboro Airport on July 6, 2019 to the hours leading up to his death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center 35 days later, the story turns on one question: how could a man placed under suicide scrutiny end up alone, amid rott
Late in the afternoon of July 6, 2019, about a dozen F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department officers waited out of view of the tarmac at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. They were trying not to spook their quarry. The day before. they had received an email saying a private jet would arrive at 5:20 p.m. and attached to it was an arrest warrant for Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein had been returning from Paris and. as the plane touched down. he made plans on his phone: a trip to his private island in the Caribbean. and a documentary interview with Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser. When customs agents boarded to check Epstein and the plane’s two pilots, the arrests began to move fast. Epstein was escorted into the terminal and told he was under arrest.
He appeared shocked, and in the chaos he managed to send one last message to Bannon: “All canceled.” Bannon wrote back immediately: “you r not coming in?” There was no reply.
As the F.B.I. agents drove Epstein to Manhattan, he asked two questions—“Is this sex trafficking?” and “Is this about underage?” It was. The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors had opened a new investigation eight months earlier into Epstein’s activities in New York. focusing on victims who had not been interviewed in his decade-old sex-crimes case in Florida. While Epstein was abroad, he was indicted under seal on charges of trafficking minors for sex. If found guilty. he faced up to 45 years in prison—far worse than the 13 months he had served in Palm Beach after a plea deal in 2008.
By the time he was booked into federal custody, Epstein said aloud, “Oh, this is bad,” and then, “This is really bad.” Shortly after 9 that night, he was taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail in Lower Manhattan.
The first person to notice something off was not an investigator or a high-level official. It was a jail employee named Elba Torres, who caught sight of Epstein as she passed his cell. Torres reported in an email to the jail staff that Epstein appeared “distraught. sad and a little confused.” When she asked if he was OK. he replied that he was. Torres wrote that she was not convinced—“because he seems dazed and withdrawn. ” and that. “So just to be on the safe side and prevent any suicidal thoughts can someone from Psychology come and talk with him.”.
Her memo. written in the early moments of Epstein’s incarceration. documented a reversal that was as jarring as it was stark. Hours earlier, Epstein had been cocooned in luxury and influence. Now he was in an overcrowded federal jail, reduced to a Bureau of Prisons number: 76318-054. It was the beginning of a journey into darkness that ended 35 days later, in the early hours of Aug. 10, 2019, when a guard found him unresponsive in his cell, hanging from a noose made from orange jail fabric.
The New York City medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide. But seven years later. many people still believe he didn’t kill himself—that he was murdered by someone with an interest in keeping him quiet. That suspicion didn’t rise from nowhere. It was fed by a public mismatch between what the official story said and what so many people thought they saw: odd decisions. mistakes and oversights. and a death that took place inside a facility known for dysfunction.
Congress helped turn the suspicion into paperwork. The Epstein Files Transparency Act. passed with bipartisan support in November. led to the disclosure of more than three million pages of Epstein-related documents. photos and videos. The release included tens of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of video gathered in official investigations into Epstein’s death—an initial inquiry by Justice Department prosecutors with F.B.I. agents and New York City detectives, and a yearslong investigation by the Justice Department inspector general. Both concluded that Epstein died by suicide.
What the newly released material added was not a neat answer, but a sharper picture of how a system under strain can miss what it should catch.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, or M.C.C., loomed over everything in the reporting. It was a Brutalist monolith infamous among federal prisoners and lawyers for poor conditions and dysfunction. Bureau of Prisons officials later warned that it posed a safety and security threat to inmates and employees alike. (It was closed in 2021.) In winter it was stiflingly hot. and in summer it was freezing cold—so cold inmates hoarded extra sheets to get through the nights. Many corrections officers worked second jobs or exhausting overtime. The jail also had a thriving underground economy, described as a reliable source of federal indictments for smuggling contraband.
Epstein, however, was not just any inmate. The unit where he was usually placed mattered. The jail’s highest-profile inmates were normally housed in a maximum-security unit on the 10th floor of the southern wing. a jail within a jail known as 10 South. isolated from other prisoners and kept under 24-hour video surveillance. The documents used in the reporting indicated there was no sign the unit was ever considered for Epstein.
Instead, at least for much of his time, he was held in the special housing unit, or SHU. The SHU was punitive by nature. with inmates held in cells for 23 hours a day and sharply limited contact with the outside world. Research has shown prolonged isolation can worsen mental illness and increase the risk of self-harm and suicide.
At first, Epstein’s arrival did not trigger special treatment. When he was taken to the rear gate of the jail on the night of July 6, he was not processed as a high-profile inmate. As a result, he was placed in the M.C.C.’s general inmate population that night.
Peter Bright recognized him when they crossed paths in the unit where both were assigned. Epstein “was not very communicative,” Bright recalled. “He seemed a bit shellshocked.” Bright’s account matters because it placed doubt immediately in the language of ordinary prison observation—what people noticed before anyone turned a file into a plan.
Trouble found Epstein almost right away in 5 North. Another prisoner, Loco Tron, accosted him. Luis Fernandez recalled that Tron was trying “to get money out of him” and “to scare him.” Dayvon Williams said he intervened to stop it.
On July 7, Lamine N’Diaye, the M.C.C. warden—by then identifying Epstein and recognizing the risks he faced in general population—ordered him moved to the SHU. That move carried its own perverse consequence: the SHU was used as a kind of ad-hoc protective custody unit. and it could place vulnerable inmates alongside violent ones.
That evening. Epstein was led up to the SHU and introduced to a muscular man with a shaved head named Nicholas Tartaglione. with whom he would share a cell. Tartaglione was 51. a former police officer awaiting trial on federal charges of killing four men. one strangled with a zip tie. Tartaglione told Epstein that. Epstein turned and pounded on the door, shouting for the guards.
Tartaglione later told the reporting that when he asked why he was put with Epstein, guards told him, “You’re the only guy who won’t beat him up or extort him.”
The next morning, Elissa Miller, the jail’s chief psychologist, placed Tartaglione’s cellmate under temporary psychological observation in a special cell, citing “multiple risk factors for suicidality” because of his sex-crime charges. Then she quickly returned him to the cell with Tartaglione.
Miller’s early meetings with Epstein left her relatively unconcerned about suicide risk. He seemed in a positive mood. He spoke optimistically about his prospects for being released on bail in advance of his trial and blew off the notion that he posed a threat to himself. He told her, “being alive is fun,” and spoke about a “big business” he had on the outside.
But after bail proceedings shifted, the forecast clouded. On July 18, his 13th day in jail, a federal judge denied him bail.
Tartaglione said that after Epstein returned to their cell from court that day. Epstein asked abruptly: “How do you make a noose?” In the days that followed. Tartaglione told the reporting he caught Epstein preparing for suicide twice. Once, he said, Epstein tried to tie a sheet to the grate over the cell window. Another time. Tartaglione woke up to Epstein standing in the dark looking “a little suspicious” and found a noose hidden under his mattress.
Tartaglione said he reported both attempts to guards, but they did not take them seriously, laughing him off. The reporting notes it could not find mention of the attempts in jail records released in the Epstein files.
Outside of the jail’s narrow routines. Epstein’s connections were his lawyers—a stream of mostly young attorneys in the legal-visit room. They were ostensibly there to plan his defense. but the reporting describes them as also providing a highly compensated form of companionship and a pretext for Epstein to remain out of his cell.
Epstein was especially preoccupied with what he might have on Donald Trump. who was then serving his first term in office. Jotting on a legal pad. he returned to the president again and again. trying to dredge up something he might offer prosecutors. The notes cited include “Trump is a total con artist — smoke & mirrors” and “Never had money.”.
His writings in jail were described as elliptical—jottings rather than full thoughts—filled with his distinctive idiosyncratic capitalization and punctuation. They also captured a sense of isolation so intense it felt physical: he complained he was denied phone calls and personal visitors and wrote that it was “impossible to mount a defense” with the SHU’s noise—“no sleep. no air. screams.”.
A few weeks into incarceration. Epstein wrote “J’ACCUSE” across the top of a piece of paper in large letters on July 22. four days after bail was denied. The reporting describes it as a reference to Emile Zola’s 1898 public letter denouncing the French government’s biased prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus. Under it, Epstein wrote: “Me/Too -Jewish-Rich-Politics,” and, “Believe the victim = Believe the accuser — CRAZY!”.
Hours later, at 1:27 a.m., guards heard banging coming from Epstein’s cell. Arriving on the tier, they heard Tartaglione yelling. One officer saw Epstein on the floor with an orange fabric noose hanging loosely around his neck. Tartaglione cut him down with a razor he had hidden in the cell and began chest compressions.
When guards arrived moments later, Epstein was breathing but still unresponsive. He regained consciousness but appeared unable to stand. He was cuffed and placed on a stretcher, carried to an observation cell near the jail psychologist’s office. He was put in a rip-proof suicide smock and left there for the rest of the night.
Epstein and Tartaglione told sharply divergent stories about what happened. Tartaglione said he was on his mattress on the floor sleeping with headphones on when he felt something bump his legs. Epstein, Tartaglione said, was seated with his back against their bunk bed, dangling from the noose. Epstein’s account was inconsistent: he initially told corrections officers that Tartaglione tried to kill him. Later, he told a jail psychologist he got up around 1 a.m. for water and then found himself surrounded by jail staff without remembering how. He also told David Schoen. a lawyer who met with him a week later. that the incident began with a “prank” that Tartaglione “sort of forced on him. ” and that he made up another story to tell guards.
Miller wrote the morning after that “it was unclear at this time” what exactly happened. She considered three plausible explanations: that Epstein really was suicidal and the attempt was a rehearsal; that Tartaglione attacked him; or that Epstein, Tartaglione, or both were gaming the jail system.
One piece of evidence might have convinced jail officials Epstein was serious—yet they did not know it existed at the time. Tartaglione told the reporting he picked up a graphic novel he had been reading and found a piece of paper tucked between pages that appeared to be a suicide note in Epstein’s handwriting.
In that note, Epstein wrote, “They investigated me for month — Found NOTHING!!!” He also wrote: “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.” And: “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!! NO FUN — NOT WORTH IT!!”
Tartaglione did not report it to jail officials. Instead, he gave it to his lawyers. The reporting describes how its value was obvious: it could support Tartaglione’s claim that he saved Epstein. and it could also provide “objective. extrinsic evidence” that it was a suicide attempt. Bruce Barket. Tartaglione’s lawyer at the time. told the reporting he planned to present the note in court or in an administrative hearing if action were taken.
But the note ended up sealed in Tartaglione’s court filings and stayed out of sight. The reporting says it became public only this May after The Times’s lawyers petitioned the judge in Tartaglione’s case to unseal it.
While the newly released records raised questions, they also fed a conclusion many officials reached at the time: if Epstein was going to die, the jail failed him most decisively not because it missed medical science, but because it missed prevention as a practical discipline.
For six days after the July 23 episode, Epstein remained in a psychological observation unit. The cells were described as spartan—only a single mattress on a metal frame. a toilet and a sink. with front walls clear enough that inmates could be observed at all times. The watching fell to rotating crews of “inmate companions,” who monitored and logged updates every 15 minutes.
William Mersey, a companion assigned to Epstein, recalled that Epstein looked “defeated.” Michael Tisdale, another companion, said Epstein told him the jail was “a really crazy world.”
Miller planned to return him to the SHU on July 29. Epstein insisted again he could not remember what happened and suggested his memory impairment might be linked to sleep apnea; he said he was awaiting delivery of a CPAP machine. He asked for more time in the observation cell. Miller agreed to one more night, then wrote that there were “no mental health issues” precluding a return.
On July 30, three weeks into his incarceration, Epstein was not placed back with Tartaglione. His former cellmate had not yet been cleared of any wrongdoing in the apparent suicide attempt, a warden wrote later. Epstein was placed with Efrain Reyes. a 50-year-old Bronx native facing drug-trafficking charges. housed in the SHU because he had been extorted and threatened in his previous unit and was cooperating with prosecutors.
The two were placed in Cell 220 on the SHU’s L Tier—close to an electrical outlet to allow Epstein to use his CPAP machine. The reporting says guards brought in two mattresses so Epstein could sleep on the floor, which violated M.C.C. policy but was rarely enforced.
Epstein and Reyes settled into an uneasy routine. Reyes noticed guards were on “eggshells” around Epstein. describing constant demands and a habit of writing down names if demands weren’t met. The guards. in his telling. approached Epstein deferentially. even allowing him items officially forbidden for safety reasons—extra pens and bedding.
Robert Adams, a corrections officer at the time, described dreading Epstein because of fear his legal team could retaliate. He recalled that when he returned Epstein to his cell after a full-day session with his lawyers and gave him a meal. Epstein asked for his name. Adams, panicking, gave him someone else’s. Epstein later told him. “Thank you for treating me with dignity and humanity. ” and Adams described Epstein as appearing “downtrodden. ” like “a lion taken out of the jungle and put in a cage.”.
In the days leading toward Aug. 10, the reporting shows how the jail’s surveillance and staffing failures became deadly. On July 31—the day after Epstein was sent back to the SHU— the U.S. Marshals Service flagged him with an “alert notice” noting that he was showing “suicidal tendencies.”
During August 9, lawyers kept meeting with Epstein, often in the legal-visit room. He checked a computer cable and told attorneys he was too much of a “coward” to kill himself. Most fatefully, he asked to update his will.
Reyes recalled an unusual request: Epstein fidgeted with fabric—a clothesline Reyes made from a bedsheet—and Reyes told him. “Bro. we not doing this. ” flushing it down the toilet. Epstein insisted he had never attempted suicide during incarceration, but he wondered aloud about how he could live in prison.
Reyes also said he told Epstein, “Don’t try to kill yourself in this cell,” because he did not want to wake up to find him dead. Epstein responded, “I’m never going to cause you trouble.”
The cell window looked onto the guards’ desk. Reyes told the reporting he saw guards sleeping in orange prisoners’ sheets against the cold of the air-conditioning.
Then, early on Aug. 9, Reyes was transferred to a private detention facility in Queens used to house inmates cooperating in other prosecutions. As he left, he told jail staff to look out for Epstein and to “Get him a good bunkie.” He added, “He’s not good to be alone.”
The reporting says that because of Epstein’s suicide risk, Miller had ordered him housed with another inmate at all times. Several corrections officers throughout Aug. 9 noted Epstein had not been assigned a new cellmate and later said they passed the information—but no one resolved the problem.
On Aug. 9, a cache of damaging documents was unsealed in a defamation lawsuit filed by Virginia Guiffre. Epstein had a final meeting with his lawyers that day and ended it earlier than usual. That evening, a supervisor named Nathaniel Bullock allowed an unmonitored phone call. Epstein told Bullock he wanted to call his mother, who had been dead for 15 years. He instead called his girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak.
According to an account of the call provided by Shuliak’s lawyers to investigators, Epstein said, “They are trying to keep me safe.” He told her his case would take longer than expected and that he would not be able to call again for another month. He told her to be strong and said he loved her.
After the phone call, Epstein was escorted back to his cell. He found it empty. No new cellmate had been sent to join him.
In the SHU, the two officers on duty late that evening were Tova Noel and Ghitto Bonhomme. Noel would stay on through the morning. Noel had not received specific training for the SHU, where she worked for less than two months. She told investigators she had been instructed to sign documents saying she had training. but the reporting details how she worked 16 hours at a stretch. dozed off behind the wheel on drives home. and sometimes called in sick just to get sleep.
At the M.C.C., understaffing was severe. Six months before Epstein arrived. Serene Gregg. president of the corrections officers’ union. wrote to Bureau of Prisons officials warning of “a dire situation” at the jail: “Quite frankly. at this point. we are one incident away from a staff or inmate fatality.” During the week Epstein died. 11 M.C.C. officers were absent from regular shifts.
The week before Aug. 10, the reporting says, Noel was already working until midnight on Aug. 9, yet desperate supervisors ordered her to take the overnight shift too.
Noel conducted rounds shortly after 10 p.m., walking past cells to confirm inmates were alive. When she passed Epstein’s cell, he called out for her to plug in his CPAP machine. She did and continued on.
It was the last time anyone would acknowledge seeing Epstein alive.
The reporting describes a surveillance system with a fatal flaw: a week earlier, technicians found a major hardware failure. Nearly half of the cameras were not recording. and while replacement hard drives had been obtained that day. they had not yet been installed. As a result, only two cameras in the SHU were recording in the hours before Epstein’s body was discovered.
One camera covered most of the common area, including the guards’ desk and a sliver of the staircase leading up to the locked door to L Tier. Beyond that door was Epstein’s cell.
The footage produced a question that lingered for years: at around 10:40 p.m. the camera briefly captured an indistinct orange shape moving up the staircase toward the L Tier door. Without full coverage. the figure fueled speculation about who might have entered or exited Epstein’s unit between Noel’s round and the discovery of his body about eight hours later.
In sworn accounts and investigators’ conclusions, the inspector general later found the shape most likely Noel herself carrying orange inmate linens or clothing up to the tier. Noel denied it in sworn testimony and interviews.
The reporting emphasizes that killing Epstein—if it was murder—would have required more than one failure. It would have required a choreography involving the SHU. the control center. staffing. cameras not recording. and keys held by guards on camera. It would also have required a willingness to risk capital charges.
After Noel’s rounds and into the hours before 3 a.m., the camera showed the officers sitting motionless. Investigators later contended they were asleep; Noel denied she was. At 3 a.m., Noel said she tried to wake Bonhomme, but he wouldn’t get up. She left the desk to help a colleague with a count upstairs in 10 South, returning three minutes later.
From 1 a.m. to 2:44 a.m., Noel and Thomas could be seen seated at the guards’ desk, motionless. The reporting says at 6:30 a.m., Thomas began delivering breakfast to Epstein’s tier. When he approached Epstein’s cell, he found him motionless. He unlocked the cell. entered. and discovered Epstein hanging from a fabric noose tied about four feet up the frame of the bunk bed. his body suspended an inch or so off the cell floor. Thomas tore him down and shouted for Noel. Noel activated an alarm. Thomas administered chest compressions, telling Epstein, “Breathe, Epstein, breathe!” and then: “We’re going to be in so much trouble.”.
Epstein was taken by ambulance to New York-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital. He was declared dead at 7:36 a.m. on Aug. 10. Later that day. his body was sent to the New York City mortuary in an unmarked vehicle after a medical examiner’s office van loaded with a decoy—cardboard boxes and sheets arranged in the approximate shape of a person—departed first.
What followed were competing ways of reading the evidence. The medical examiner Kristin Roman. a veteran medical examiner for the city. conducted the autopsy the morning after Epstein’s death. Her findings, announced five days later, were unequivocal: Epstein died by self-hanging. The reporting says Roman never spoke publicly and retired recently.
But Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, had enlisted a pathologist, Michael Baden, to observe the autopsy. Baden later told Mark that Epstein’s injuries seemed more in line with homicidal strangulation than self-hanging but he wanted more information. Two months later, Baden announced on Fox News, “I think that the evidence points towards homicide rather than suicide.”.
Baden’s argument focused on three bone and cartilage fractures in Epstein’s neck. The reporting states it presented Baden’s claim to nine pathologists and doctors. Many said those fractures can also occur in suicidal hangings and that determining manner of death based on autopsy findings alone is limited. Judy Melinek. a board-certified forensic pathologist who often consults on criminal cases. said. “Forensics is not an exact science. ” calling it interpretive. and said neck injuries are among the hardest to interpret conclusively.
The dispute wasn’t just medical. It was practical: much of what investigators relied on came from a scene they did not fully sample because they did not recognize the need in time.
Still, the reporting lays out what would be the key failure at the heart of the official conclusion: when Epstein was placed alone, despite repeated suicide-risk warnings and despite policy that he not be left without a cellmate, he was exposed to the exact kind of opportunity he had already tested.
Justice officials said Epstein’s death by hanging could be accomplished quickly enough for guards to miss it between rounds, particularly when Epstein could see the guards’ desk from his cell window and had ongoing access to materials described in the records.
At the same time, the reporting acknowledges why suspicion persists. The jail’s understaffing. the cameras that were not recording. the rounds that were not done on time. and the fact that the SHU guards on that night would later face charges and deferred prosecutions created enough gaps for a story to pull apart in the public imagination.
In the most consequential hours of Aug. 9 into Aug. 10, Epstein was not a silhouette in an abstract mystery. He was a man with a known pattern of behavior and suicide risk. left alone in a unit where staffing shortfalls and surveillance failures had already been documented. The reporting describes a moment that can’t be explained away by debate: Reyes warned staff he was “not good to be alone. ” and hours later Epstein returned from a phone call to an empty cell.
As the reporting ends. it returns to the image that feels like the whole case in miniature: the last known image of Epstein alive appears to be a brief fragment of surveillance footage at 7:49 p.m. on Aug. 9, after his final phone call. He is visible for a split second—little more than a silver head of hair—stripped of his wealth and influence. reduced to something vague and elusive.
Then he is gone.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Jeffrey Epstein Metropolitan Correctional Center SHU Tova Noel Ghitto Bonhomme Elba Torres Elissa Miller Nicholas Tartaglione Efrain Reyes Epstein Files Transparency Act suicide New York City medical examiner