It’s been nearly seven years since disgraced financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died in a New York prison and still, there’s no shortage of questions surrounding his death. It’s for this incomprehensible mosaic, too, that newly appointed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had less than a month to get comfortable in his new position before he was hit with a lawsuit over the Justice Department’s inability to provide us with the full picture of whatever the fuck’s going on. And on Thursday, the New York Times just added a little bit more to the fog. Great!
The outlet says it petitioned a judge this week to unseal an unreported suicide note written by Epstein, allegedly written before he first tried—unsuccessfully—to kill himself in July 2019. (He died about two weeks later.) The note’s existence was flagged by Epstein’s former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer who’s currently serving four life sentences after being charged with a quadruple homicide. (Tartaglione maintains he’s innocent, and is seeking an appeal.)
Tartaglione told the NYT he remembers finding the note shortly after Epstein’s first suicide attempt. He also said the note was written on paper from a yellow legal pad; that it included mention of a “time to say goodbye”; and he’d stashed it inside a graphic novel for safekeeping. Per the outlet:
The note said that investigators had looked into Mr. Epstein for many months and “found nothing,” Mr. Tartaglione recalled. He said the message continued along the lines of: “What do you want me to do, bust out crying? Time to say goodbye.”
Apparently, Tartaglione gave the note to his own lawyers after Epstein initially blamed him for the marks on his neck, telling prison guards that he wasn’t actually suicidal, but actually attacked. (Epstein never repeated these claims, and instead told the Bureau of Prisons he “never had any issues” with Tartaglione.) It was because of this that the note was allegedly placed in Tartaglione’s legal file, and according to records, authenticated by lawyers.
So an ex-cop-turned drug dealer who murdered four people execution-style, whom Jeffrey Epstein accused of killing him and is also seeking a pardon from Donald Trump says he found Epstein’s suicide note seven years ago in a book. One of his lawyers says he turned it over to the… pic.twitter.com/Bs5JflDtMD
— julie k. brown (@jkbjournalist) April 30, 2026
Speaking to the NYT, a Justice Department spokesperson said the agency never saw such a note—and it was never mentioned in the DOJ’s investigations into Epstein’s death. She also said that under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the DOJ’s gone through an “exhaustive effort to collect all records in its possession.”
But this “exhaustive effort”—again—is the same one that’s landed Blanche a lawsuit, after he in January claimed the DOJ uploaded the last of the files after it dumped three million pages onto its website. (This tranche of files were also riddled with errors, and exposed the details and nude images of various Epstein victims.) About a month later, NPR found the DOJ was still withholding files, and the U.K.-based Telegraph reported Epstein had about six storage units in the U.S.—all of which with various hard drives, computers, and photographs—that had yet to be investigated.
So, all things considered, if such a suicide note does exist … it may be right up there with a flurry of other files the DOJ has yet to show to the American public.
