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A suicide note purportedly written by sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before his death has been unsealed by a federal judge in New York City after years out of public view.
The document was released by the U.S. District Court on Wednesday.
“They investigated me for months — FOUND NOTHING!!!” read the handwritten note, adding that the investigation resulted in charges going back years.
“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” it continued.
“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!! NO FUN — NOT WORTH IT!!”
CBC News could not independently verify the note’s authorship. The letter was not included in the trove of documents related to the Epstein case, but a reference to a note left in a book of Epstein’s was included in a chronology explaining how the document ended up in the case file of Epstein’s cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione.
Tartaglione said he discovered the note after Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell after an apparent suicide attempt in July 2019, according to the New York Times. Epstein, 66, was found dead at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York the following month, where he had been awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
The note later became part of a conflict-of-interest dispute in court involving Tartaglione and his defence lawyers. The document was sealed to protect attorney-client privilege in May 2021, but published on Wednesday after the New York Times successfully petitioned the court for its release.
“Even if the Note had at some point been protected by attorney-client privilege (and, at least based on what is publicly known, it is not clear how it could have), Mr. Tartaglione has now revealed both its existence and contents. There is no justification for the continued secrecy of that discrete document,” Al-Amyn Sumar, senior counsel for the New York Times, wrote on Wednesday in arguing for the note’s publication.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Karas agreed with the newspaper’s argument that privilege no longer applied because Tartaglione effectively waived that privilege by repeatedly discussing the contents of the note on a public basis, including in interviews with the Times and a Substack author.
“No party has identified any competing consideration that would justify sealing the Note, let alone ‘considerations sufficient to overcome the … presumption of public access,'” Karas wrote in his ruling on Wednesday.
In its response to the Times’s application, the U.S. Department of Justice also agreed Tartaglione had waived privilege by discussing the document publicly. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton the government was “unaware of the subject matter” of the court case that saw the note sealed, beyond what was visible on the public docket.
Tartaglione “briefly” shared a cell with Epstein while awaiting trial for murder, court filings said. He was convicted and sentenced to four life sentences for murder after a jury trial in 2023.
He has since filed an appeal.
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