When Jeffrey Epstein’s brother saw the purported suicide note left by the now-dead financier, he didn’t believe it was real.
Mark Epstein, who has long maintained that his brother was murdered, told Business Insider the note, which was unsealed by a judge this week, is a forgery.
“It wouldn’t be hard to get some pro forger to forge a note,” Mark Epstein told BI. “That’s the easiest fucking thing in the world to do.”
Jeffrey Epstein left the note in a Manhattan jail cell after a suicide attempt, according to Nicholas Tartaglione, his former cellmate, who claims to have found it. The note surfaced on Wednesday through a convoluted series of events.
The note was not written immediately before Epstein’s death on August 10, 2019, but during an earlier suicide attempt that July, according to Tartaglione.
Tartaglione — a former police officer who kidnapped and killed four people before burying them on his upstate New York property — said Epstein left the note in a book when he was transferred to a different cell following the July 23 suicide attempt, while he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
Tartaglione’s lawyers entered the note into his criminal case, where it was sealed in a dispute over his legal representation. US District Judge Kenneth Karas, who presided over the case, unsealed it this week, nearly six years after Tartaglione says he found it.
US District Court for the Southern District of New York
“They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note reads. “So 15 year old charges resulted.”
“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” it continues. “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!”
Jeffrey Epstein has used variations of the last line — “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” — in emails to Mark Epstein and friends that were made public by the Justice Department. It appears to be a reference to the 1931 comedy video “Little Daddy” from the show “Little Rascals.”
Mark Epstein told Business Insider he does not recall those emails, but he would not be surprised if his brother referenced the show. He compared the show in the 1960s to “SpongeBob SquarePants” in its ubiquity.
“Who didn’t watch ‘The Little Rascals’ in the ’60s when we were kids?” he said. “I mean, everybody watched that.”
Mark Epstein said whoever forged the suicide note would have adopted his brother’s “voice” from the emails included in the Epstein files “to make it seem real.”
“It’s public knowledge,” he said. “It’s in the emails. So they stole it from me to make it sound like it was him.”
According to Kara’s unsealing order, the note was originally sealed in May 2021 — well before Epstein’s emails with the “Little Rascals” reference became public earlier this year.
A timeline included in the Epstein files shows that it passed through the hands of multiple people who tried to authenticate it in 2019 and 2020. Tartaglione also described the note in a podcast interview with the influencer Jessica Reed Kraus last year, also before the release of the Epstein files.
The note itself was not included in the Justice Department’s Epstein files, nor in a 128-page Justice Department inspector general report that followed four years of investigation into Epstein’s death.
Epstein’s first reported suicide attempt is itself a subject of dispute.
He was found in his cell “with a homemade fashioned noose around his neck,” according to an internal report from the Bureau of Prisons. Tartaglione’s lawyers said it was a suicide attempt. Epstein first told jail officials that Tartaglione tried to kill him, but a week later said he was “extremely tired” the day of the incident and did not remember it well, according to a jail report. The inspector general’s report ultimately characterized it as a first suicide attempt that preceded a successful one three weeks later.
Mark Epstein said his brother recanted his claim that Tartaglione “roughed him up” because he did not want to be seen as a “snitch.”
“The reason he changed his tune is because he was afraid of retaliation,” Mark Epstein said. “It’s one thing to be a pedophile in prison. It’s another thing to be a pedophile snitch in prison. That’s no fun for anybody.”
Karas has indicated he would later unseal additional court documents related to the note, which could shed additional light on its authenticity.
Mark Epstein remains skeptical.
“I don’t know if Tartaglione had this note. I doubt that. I doubt he found this,” he said. “There was no attempted suicide, so there was no suicide note.”
He says the most likely explanation of Jeffrey Epstein’s death is that another person near his cell, out of view from cameras, killed him, and that the Justice Department is perpetuating a cover-up by not treating the death as a murder investigation.
Mark Epstein said that, if his brother chose to kill himself, he wouldn’t write a note at all.
“If he was going to commit suicide, he doesn’t have to explain it to anybody,” he said.
