A rumoured ‘suicide note’ found by Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate has been made public after being locked in a courtroom for five years.
The note, found by Epstein’s former cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione, had been sealed and locked in a courthouse vault for nearly five years as part of an unrelated legal dispute.
US district judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, New York, ordered the note’s release after The New York Times petitioned last week to unseal it and other documents in a case involving Epstein’s cellmate.
Few people had known about the note until Tartaglione, a former police officer who is serving a life sentence for killing four people, mentioned it on a podcast last year.
Tartaglione claimed he discovered the note in a book in his cell after Epstein was found on July 23, 2019, with a strip of bedsheet around his neck.
The messages scribbled on it, allegedly by Epstein, are harrowing.
‘They investigated me for a month – found nothing!!!’ said the short note, which is hard to decipher in some places.
‘It is a treat to be able to choose the time to say goodbye,’ the note continues.
‘Watcha want me to do – Bust out cryin!!’
The note concludes: ‘NO FUN,’ with those words underlined. ‘NOT WORTH IT!!’
In interviews by phone from a federal prison in California, Tartaglione told how he found it.
In the month before his death, Epstein was moved to a different part of the jail and briefly placed on suicide watch.
Around then, Tartaglione said, he found the note in his cell, tucked into a graphic novel.
‘I opened the book to read, and there it was,’ Tartaglione claimed. He said it was a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad.
‘My lawyers at the time wanted to make sure, you know, I didn’t write it,’ Tartaglione said in a July 2025 interview, adding they had ‘handwriting experts’ examine the note.
Epstein’s brother Mark has long claimed Jeffrey was ‘murdered’ and then ‘covered up’.
An expert Mark hired to attend the autopsy also said his death looked ‘more consistent with homicidal strangulation’.
Documents and reports have also shown that prison guards failed to conduct checks on the night of Jeffrey’s death and that the camera system in the unit was also down.
On the night she was meant to be checking on Jeffrey every 30 minutes, guard Tova Noel, 37, reportedly slept on the job, browsed furniture online, and even searched ‘latest on Epstein in jail’ less than an hour before the sex offender committed suicide in August 2019.
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