Epstein Forums

A suicide note purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein in a Manhattan jail has been kept secret for nearly seven years, locked up in a New York courthouse.

A cellmate said he discovered the note in July 2019, after Mr. Epstein was found unresponsive with a strip of cloth around his neck. Mr. Epstein survived that incident but weeks later was found dead in the jail.

The note was eventually sealed by a federal judge as part of the cellmate’s own criminal case, according to documents and interviews. That means investigators scrutinizing Mr. Epstein’s high-profile death lacked what could have been a key piece of evidence.

On Thursday, The New York Times petitioned the judge to unseal the note, which said it was “time to say goodbye,” the cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, recalled. While Mr. Tartaglione mentioned the note on a podcast last year, the scrawled message has remained hidden from public view, even at a time of unprecedented transparency around the government’s investigations into Mr. Epstein. Since December, the Justice Department has released millions of pages of documents related to the sexual predator.

The Times has not seen the note and could not find it in the Epstein files. A Justice Department spokeswoman said the agency had not seen it.

But a cryptic two-page chronology in the records describes how the note became tangled up in Mr. Tartaglione’s messy legal case. The chronology says that Mr. Tartaglione’s lawyers authenticated the note, though it does not explain how. If it was written by Mr. Epstein, the message could provide insights into his state of mind in the weeks before he died hanging from a bunk bed.

The Justice Department spokeswoman said that in response to a federal law demanding the release of the government’s Epstein files, the agency “underwent an exhaustive effort to collect all records in its possession,” including those from the Bureau of Prisons and the Office of the Inspector General.