Michael Barbaro: Let me set the scene for you. It's late in the afternoon, July 6th, 2019. Jeffrey Epstein is flying back from Paris. He's on his private plane, and he's about to land at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, which is a small airport that's often used by wealthy people in New York for their private jets. He's making plans, including heading to his private island in the Caribbean. Eventually, his plane lands. A couple of customs agents come on board the plane to check his passport, the way they usually do with private planes. And then they ask him to come to the terminal, and he follows them. When he gets to the terminal, there's an FBI agent and an NYPD detective waiting for him. And they tell him that he's under arrest. Epstein appears shocked by this. And in the car on the way to Manhattan with the agents, he asked them two questions. One is, is this sex trafficking? And the other is, is this about underage? Epstein's taken that night to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the big federal jail in lower Manhattan, the MCC. And he's only been there for a matter of hours when one of the jail employees notices him and sees this guy who seems distraught and sad and a little confused.

Michael Barbaro: She's concerned enough that she sits down and writes an email to the jail staff. And she says she thinks somebody from the psychology department should come and talk to him, quote, "just to be on the safe side and prevent any suicidal thoughts." From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily. Today, the untold story of Jeffrey Epstein's final weeks, days, and hours inside a Manhattan jail. My colleague Charles Homans takes us inside a major new investigation by the Times that tries to answer the question that refuses to go away. Did the world's most powerful and well-connected sex offender die by his own hand or by somebody else's? It's Thursday, June 18th. Charlie, why at this stage in the Jeffrey Epstein story, seven years after his death, when all eyes are on his network of friends and his enablers, his victims, all the politics around the release of the Epstein files, why did you all undertake this inquiry into his death right now?

Charles Homans: You know, suspicions around Epstein's death have really been incredibly persistent from literally, you know, the hour that the story broke back in 2019. People have been very suspicious of the official story, which from the beginning was that he died by suicide in his jail cell. And there's just a lot about the story that has not sat well with people ever since. And it's one of the very unique paranoid elements in American politics that really feels like it crosses pretty much all political boundaries. I've certainly met conservatives and liberals and Trump supporters and Trump haters who all think that Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.

Michael Barbaro: Right. It's a bipartisan view that hasn't really dimmed.

Charles Homans: Right. I mean, this has been amplified online by literally everyone from Donald Trump to Hunter Biden at one point or another.

Michael Barbaro: As somebody who has written a lot about conspiratorial thinking in American life, I'm curious what you yourself think of that viewpoint.

Charles Homans: I think that I shared a pretty common skepticism about the official story of Epstein's death going into this reporting. There was just a lot about it that seemed instinctively very strange. There was this huge sort of cascade of mistakes and technical failures and just kind of weird mysteries around his death that was hard to I think take at face value for a lot of people. And the suspicion around this case was really inflamed by the release of the Epstein files. There are thousands of pages in the files relating to this series of federal investigations into Epstein's death. There was one that immediately followed by the FBI and federal prosecutors. And then there was one by the Office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department that went on for years after this. And a lot of the raw materials of those investigations are in the Epstein files. So my colleagues and I, Steve Eder, Jan Ransom, Michael Rothfeld, we dove into these papers a couple months ago and just started digging and seeing what was there. So many of these files, there's just so many of them that even some of the stuff that's been out in the public eye, has not actually really been fully picked through. And we were able to take advantage of the experience of some of the people on this project who really know the Epstein story forwards and backwards and who were able to make connections inside of these files and figure out who some of the people were who we were reading about in some of these redacted documents. So we used these documents as a road map to do our own investigation, interviewing anybody we could find, gathering any other documents we could find, and trying to construct in as much detail as we could Jeffrey Epstein's last days in this jail, the moments leading up to his death. And the biggest question of all, how did he die? Did he die by suicide or did something else happen?

Michael Barbaro: Well, we're going to get to that conclusion, but I want to do it by having you reconstruct the story you all found in your reporting. And let's for the purposes of our storytelling here pick up with what happens after this employee clocks Epstein's despondency, his distraughtness as he's coming in. So within hours of arriving, Epstein has his first real rough encounter in this jail. The inmates have very quickly figured out who he is.

Charles Homans: And a guy who calls himself Locotron, which is Dominican slang for like a crazy person, comes up to him with a t-shirt pulled up over his face and shakes him down for money.

Michael Barbaro: It's this very quick interaction, but it's something that clearly really rattles Epstein. If you think about this, like only hours before he is, you know, in his own private jet crossing the Atlantic and suddenly he's in this fairly notorious jail being shaken down in the sort of protection scheme.

Charles Homans: It's an incredible reversal of fortune that's almost hard to imagine. So by the next day, the jail warden figured out who Epstein is, and they decide that he can't be in general population. There's too much risk there, clearly. and they put him in the special housing unit, what they call the SHU. The special housing unit is a sort of solitary confinement wing of the MCC. It is a very isolated place. The inmates are stuck in their cells 23 hours a day and it's used to house people for a number of reasons, but this includes some of, you know, people accused of very, very serious crimes and violent crimes. So Epstein is led into his new cell and he's introduced to his cellmate who's this guy named Nicholas Tartaglione and the door closes behind him. Epstein asks Tartaglione what he's in for. And Tartaglione replies multiple homicides.

Michael Barbaro: Wow.

Charles Homans: And at this point, Epstein turns around and starts banging on the door and demands to be let out of the cell.

Michael Barbaro: He's basically saying, "Get me the hell out of this cell. I don't want to be the next person killed by this alleged multi-killer."

Charles Homans: Exactly. But the fact that Epstein was put with Tartaglione reflects the sort of counterintuitive prison warden logic which is that people who have been accused of very serious violent crimes on the outside while they're awaiting trial are actually very unlikely to commit further violent crimes. that somebody like Tartaglione who's facing the death penalty at this point has every incentive you know not to kill somebody like Jeffrey Epstein in prison

Michael Barbaro: his incentives are to be in this logic as good to Epstein as possible so that at sentencing

Charles Homans: the theory is that if he behaves well while he's awaiting trial that could be factored into his sentencing and he could avoid the death penalty but for the wardens in this situation the goal is not just to find a cellmate who's not going to kill Epstein. The goal is to find a cellmate who is going to keep Epstein from hurting himself.

Michael Barbaro: From the time they kind of realize who they've got on their hands here. This is a question that they're asking. You know, because of the nature of the charges that he's facing, there's sort of an automatic assessment for suicide risk that kicks in early on in his time in jail. And the prison psychologist who assesses him comes away from those early conversations feeling like actually his risk is not that great. He's he seems pretty upbeat. He seems optimistic that he's going to get bail. It feels like he's confident about being able to fight the charges against him.

Michael Barbaro: Okay. So, what happens next?

Charles Homans: In mid-July, Epstein finds out that he's been denied bail and he's going to have to stay in this jail until he goes to trial,

Michael Barbaro: which could be quite a long time.

Charles Homans: which could be quite a long time. So, we spoke with Tartaglione and what he told us was that when Epstein came back from this hearing where his bail was denied, he turned around and asked him, "How do you make a noose?"

Michael Barbaro: Wow, he is despondent. And what does Epstein's cellmate do with this really ominous question?

Charles Homans: So after this, Tartaglione told us he noticed Epstein doing what seemed to be making preparations for suicide attempts twice in the days after his bail was denied.

Michael Barbaro: And what did those look like?

Charles Homans: In one instance, he was tying a sheet to a grate over the window in the corner of their cell. Another time, he said he woke up and saw Epstein kind of standing strangely in their cell and looked under his mattress and found a noose that he was hiding there.

Michael Barbaro: Wow. This behavior seems like a real tell about how miserable he is, but I'm curious what at this point Epstein is telling people outside of jail, to the degree he has access to them, about his state of mind.

Charles Homans: It's interesting. One group we found in our reporting that had a pretty clear window on Epstein while he was in jail was his lawyers. His lawyers were visiting him for hours every day at the jail. you know, he's now been in this very isolated unit in the jail for a number of days. And, you know, he says things to his lawyers like, "I can't do this." And he's often writing notes to himself on a legal pad. And in these conversations, in these notes, he's conveying sort of fragments of his state of mind, which really does seem to be getting worse. In the notes, he's talking about things like just the noise in the unit where he's being held. He writes, "No sleep, no air, screams." He's conveying that this is a really miserable experience. So, in July 23rd, several days after his bail is denied, around 1:30 in the morning, the guards hear this banging coming from Epstein's cell. And they arrive and they see Tartaglione is yelling at the door. And inside Epstein is on the floor motionless with this orange noose around his neck.

Michael Barbaro: This is what we've come to understand to be his first attempt at potentially dying by suicide.

Charles Homans: Right. And at the time it's a little unclear going through the documentation of this incident. We saw a lot of genuine uncertainty on the part of the jail staff about what actually happened here because nobody saw it. And Tartaglione and Epstein tell very different stories about this incident.

Charles Homans: From the beginning, Tartaglione says that Epstein tried to kill himself. Tartaglione was sleeping on the floor of their cell when he feels something bump into his feet. And he looks up and he sees Epstein unconscious in the sitting position with a noose around his neck hanging from their bunk and cuts him down and yells for the guards. Epstein's version of this story kind of changes over time. Initially, he says that Tartaglione attacked him

Michael Barbaro: and later on he starts saying that he doesn't remember what happened that he got up to get a drink of water and next thing he knew he was lying on the floor. Mhm.

Charles Homans: And later on he tells the story to one of the lawyers who visits him that Tartaglione was sort of playing some sort of prank on him. And it's all a little unclear in the telling. The jail officials never conclusively determine what happened. But in the meantime, Epstein is put on suicide watch, right? Quite logically. And throughout this whole time, the jail psychologists wardens are trying to make sense of this case. And they end up kind of uncertain about what happened and how much risk Epstein really seems to pose to himself. But in our reporting, we found one piece of evidence that might have changed their assessment if they had had it at the time,

Michael Barbaro: but it was hidden from them. And and what is that evidence and why was it hidden?

Charles Homans: So, shortly after this incident with the noose, Tartaglione is flipping through a graphic novel that he has in their cell when he finds this piece of paper and it looks very much like a suicide note written by Epstein.

Michael Barbaro: What does it say?

Charles Homans: It says, "They investigated me for a month, found nothing." At another point, he writes, "It is a treat to be able to choose one's time to say goodbye." And then, "What you want me to do? Bust out crying. No fun. Not worth it."

Michael Barbaro: What did you make of that note?

Charles Homans: So, there's a sentence, "it is a treat to be able to choose one's time to say goodbye." That seems like a pretty clear reference to planning to kill himself. And there's this other sentence here which is part of why we believe this note is authentic, which is this kind of strange line, "what you want me to do, bust out crying." This is a line from the Little Rascals, the very early movie TV show characters. And it's something that for whatever reason Epstein had latched on to as a kind of little personal catchphrase, like he threw it into emails with, you know, very close friends and family sometimes. And it's something that Tartaglione almost certainly would not have known about. This is a really very specific phrase that he seemed to only use with people he was very close to.

Michael Barbaro: And why was this very revealing letter basically a suicide note kept hidden from jail officials?

Charles Homans: So for complicated reasons, this note ends up getting sealed in Tartaglione's case. The only reason we know about it is because we sued to get this judge in the case to unseal this document, which the judge eventually did. But at the time, the jail authorities didn't know about this note at all. And they were still trying to figure out what exactly to make of this attempt, who to believe. And in the end, the jail psychologist decides that Epstein's risk of suicide is only moderate.

Michael Barbaro: And so he's sent back to the SHU to the special housing unit where he was before. And this time he has a new cellmate, a guy named Efrain Reyes, who is a 50-year-old drug dealer from the Bronx who is in the SHU because he's cooperating in another case. So he's there for his own safety also. And what does Reyes observe about Epstein?

Charles Homans: So Reyes becomes in a way one of the most interesting witnesses to Epstein's time in jail. He was interviewed by investigators afterwards. He unfortunately died of heart disease in 2020. We weren't able to interview him, but there are handwritten notes in the Epstein files of an interview with Reyes by a federal prosecutor, and they are one of the most interesting documents of Epstein's time in jail. Reyes seems to get to know him pretty well. They spend a lot of time together in this cell, and you know, he struck the people who interviewed him as this fairly genuine person who seem to want to kind of help Epstein deal with jail. They trade food. You know, Epstein appreciates clearly some of his help and, you know, gets him a radio from the commissary. Reyes notices that the guards are deferential to Epstein. You know, they let him hang on to these extra sheets that he's stashed in the cell, which was not uncommon because the air conditioning, it was very cold in the summer in this jail. They're kind of building a relationship in this cell that feels really genuine actually. And by the time that Epstein comes back and is placed with Reyes in this cell, you know, his reputation has sort of preceded him, not only do they know who he is, but they also know that there's been this thing that looked like a suicide attempt. And Reyes from the beginning is very worried that Epstein is going to attempt suicide again while he's living with him.

Michael Barbaro: And he actually brings this up directly with Epstein a number of times.

Charles Homans: He says, you know, "please don't do nothing while I'm in here. I have a chance to go home soon. I don't care what you did. That's all I ask. If I can help you, let me know."

Michael Barbaro: "Don't kill yourself on my watch. That's bad for me."

Charles Homans: Exactly. So, Reyes notices things. This is something that was pretty common with inmates at the MCC is that they would fashion clothes lines out of bits of bed sheets. And Reyes has these lines that he's made himself by, you know, tying strips of bed sheet together. and he notices that Epstein is looking at and kind of fidgeting with this line that he's got strung up in the cell and he kind of puts two and two together and confronts him and he says, "Bro, we not doing this." And he takes the line from him and he flushes it down the toilet in their cell. And Epstein says something very interesting to him. He says, "Don't worry, I'm never going to cause you trouble."

Michael Barbaro: He doesn't say, "Don't worry, I'm never going to try to do that."

Charles Homans: Exactly. And you know another time he tries to convince Epstein that you can survive in jail. He says you can live in jail. But Epstein is very pessimistic. He tells him that you know because the government is still mad about this plea agreement that he made in his last prosecution that they're not going to let him out again. He says I know I'm never going to see the street again. And he says that life in prison is no way to live.

Michael Barbaro: So, it's now early August. Epstein has been in jail about a month. And on August 9th, Reyes is moved to another facility. And he's worried enough about Epstein by this point that he tells the jail officials on his way out the door, "Get him a good bunky. He's not good to be alone. Don't leave Jeffrey Epstein alone if I'm not here with him." But that's exactly what's about to happen. Jeffrey Epstein is going to be left alone in this cell for the last night of his life. Charlie, tell us about Jeffrey Epstein's last day in this jail. You just said that he's suddenly alone despite his last cellmate saying that would be a very bad idea. Why?

Charles Homans: In our reporting, we found it's genuinely unclear why he didn't get another cellmate. A number of people flagged this issue, but for whatever reason, by the end of the day, he still doesn't have a cellmate. He returns to his cell and he's all alone. The only people watching him at this point are the guards.

Michael Barbaro: And how many guards are watching Epstein? What's the setup?

Charles Homans: So, this is a jail that has for a very long time had just a ton of chronic problems. And one of them is real issues of staffing. It's understaffed. It's overcrowded with inmates. And the staff who's working because it's understaffed tend to be working very long hours, which has this sort of cascading effect. They're often very, very tired, sometimes calling in sick because they need to catch up on sleep. People are being subbed in at all sorts of jobs they don't regularly do. It's just kind of a recipe for disaster. So much so that 6 months before all this happened, a union official representing the corrections officers at this jail warned in a letter to the Bureau of Prisons, quote, "Quite frankly, at this point, we are one incident away from a staff or inmate fatality." So, there are two guards on duty in the SHU at this time, and they sit at this desk that you can actually see from Epstein's cell. And when Reyes was still in the cell, they would watch these guards at night and kind of note their behaviors and, you know, the fact that they were often sleeping on the job, things like that. So Epstein actually knew a good bit, we think, about the guards behaviors and their inattention at times. Given all these problems at this jail, what have you and our colleagues learned about what these guards on duty this night did or didn't do? So, there was one guard in particular who was on duty through this entire period of time leading up to Epstein's death, a woman named Tova Noel. And Noel had already been working basically the whole day when she was forced to take another overtime shift beginning at midnight. And the result of this is that she's sort of the one guard who's there throughout this whole period of time when Epstein dies. And at the beginning of that time period, she's working with another guard who's sort of unaccounted for, might be sleeping. It's a little unclear. And she's doing what the guards are supposed to do, which is these regular rounds of all the cells in the SHU, just checking to make sure everything's okay. And then she comes by Epstein's cell. He asks her to plug in his CPAT machine that he has because he has sleep apnea and he needs this to sleep. She plugs in the machine, continues on her way. This is the last time anyone acknowledges seeing Epstein alive. It's a little after 10:00 at this point. The night goes on. Noel and the other guard are supposed to make these rounds regular. There's actually a sign on the desk that says specifically they need to be checking every half hour on Epstein. This is the one thing they're absolutely supposed to be doing.

Michael Barbaro: Somebody has said to them, "Whatever else you do, check on Epstein."

Charles Homans: Right? And this is the thing that they do not do the rest of the night. We know this from the video camera footage of this part of the jail. They are sitting at the desk. It seems possible they're sleeping, although both guards have denied it, but nobody is checking on the cells overnight.

Michael Barbaro: So, because of that, what we came to learn in our reporting was that the only people who were really alert to what was happening in Epstein's cell were the other inmates on the hall with him.

Charles Homans: And what do they observe? So, we found an inmate who was at the time housed in the cell right next to Epstein's cell and he told a very interesting story. One thing about these cells is you can actually hear a fair amount between the cells and late that night he hears this ripping sound coming from Epstein's cell.

Michael Barbaro: Ripping sound.

Charles Homans: It sounds like someone's ripping sheets in there. And he kind of connects the dots here and, you know, has clearly has some sense of what's happening. And so he tries to kind of distract Epstein and he calls out and he asks him if he has any stamps. Stamps are kind of a common currency in jail. And Epstein tells him, "I didn't order any stamps." And basically buzz off. Basically buzz off. And that's the end of their interaction. This inmate says he keeps hearing this ripping sound for a while and then it goes quiet.

Michael Barbaro: And then what happens?

Charles Homans: So from this point on, things are very quiet on the SHU for the next 6 hours or so. And then at 6:30, the other guard on duty, a man by the name of Michael Thomas, is delivering breakfast. And he rolls the card into the corridor where Epstein's cell is. And he sees Epstein, part of Epstein's body, motionless through this narrow window in the cell. And he calls out for him. There's no movement in the cell. He opens the door and he sees Epstein hanging by a noose.

Michael Barbaro: So, Michael Thomas, this guard calls out for the other guard, this woman Toba Noel, and Noel activates an alarm. Meanwhile, Thomas rips Epstein down from where he's hanging. He lays him out on the floor and starts administering chest compressions, and he shouts, "Breathe, Epstein. Breathe. And then she hears him say, "We're going to be in so much trouble." And about an hour later, Epstein's been taken to the hospital and declared dead. Charlie, at the beginning of this conversation, you said that all this reporting was pointing to one conclusion. And in listening to you talk about what you all found, that conclusion would seem to be not all that ambiguously suicide.

Charles Homans: That's right. In all of our reporting, it was clear that the overwhelming preponderance of circumstantial evidence pointed to suicide. Epstein had been talking about actively attempting writing references to killing himself for days before this happened. It's reflected in the notes that he wrote in jail. people who spent the most time with him, his cellmates, perceived this. And this was sort of the starting point for the first people who investigated this death after it happened. You know, I think that pretty much immediately after his body was found, there's these questions about how did this happen? And a lot of them seemed to kind of operate on this assumption that that it was unthinkable that somebody as significant as Epstein would have been allowed to kill themselves in this jail. But the people who actually knew this facility well, the inmates and certainly the federal prosecutors who spent a lot of time dealing with people being held there, had a better sense of what kind of jail this was and that it was a place where lapses on the part of the guards were very common,

Michael Barbaro: where a lot of things went wrong and it wasn't necessarily as counterintuitive to them that somebody would have been able to get away with this there. Interesting. But as much as all the evidence points in this direction, there are some very important gaps which we should talk about.

Michael Barbaro: Okay, let's talk about them.

Charles Homans: The first is the autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein. You know, the day after his body was found, the city medical examiner did a full autopsy and she concluded that he had died by self-hanging. But there are a set of credible questions about the marks on his body and whether they were exclusively consistent with suicide or whether they could have been consistent with homicide. Also, we put this to a number of pathologists and actually got a lot of different opinions when they were looking at these photos. But what nearly all of them say is it's really not possible to determine a manner of death conclusively from looking at the body alone. You would need this whole other suite of information about the circumstances the body was found, the death scene, and that's the information that we simply don't have because a lot of it wasn't gathered at the time of his death.

Michael Barbaro: And why wasn't it gathered at the time of his death?

Charles Homans: Well, that brings us to the second gap, which is these really pretty big holes in the initial handling of the death scene and some aspects of the first investigations into the scene. So, remember Epstein is found in the morning around 6:30 by one of these guards, bringing him breakfast. And that guard didn't actually tell investigators or really anybody, I think, except for maybe his supervisors what he saw until much much later. Two years later, actually, is when he gives a real interview about this to investigators. And in that interview, he didn't really have a lot of detail. He had some detail about how the body was found when he got there, but not very much. And by the time anybody else makes it into the cell, he's pulled down Epstein and he's put him on the floor. And pretty soon, you have other guards, you have EMTs, you have all sorts of people trampling over this death scene to the point where it's really been very badly contaminated by the time the FBI shows up.

Michael Barbaro: And for that reason, according to their own records of this, the FBI agents did not take DNA evidence from anything in the scene. Um, this is a little unusual. You normal procedure would be to take DNA evidence, but they didn't do that. I mean, from everything you're saying, what you'd expect to be a fairly pristine investigatory scene because it is occurring in a federally controlled facility staffed by law enforcement turns into instead a bit of a fiasco.

Charles Homans: I would say it's not super unusual. You know, a lot of people are operating under the assumption that he might not actually be dead in this moment and their first priority is to resuscitate him if that's possible. So, it's not crazy that the guards and the paramedics are sort of trampling all over this place. But that is what happened. And it led to them making some real errors in terms of cataloging the evidence in the scene. The most notable is probably that they grabbed the wrong noose from his cell.

Michael Barbaro: Huh. So there were a number of different, you know, nooses or things that looked like nooses that Epstein had around him in this cell.

Charles Homans: The cell was really a mess. There were all these piles of linens and there were a number of these strips of fabric kind of scattered around the cell. The one that they grabbed was tied in the shape of a noose, but investigators later concluded was not the one that he actually used.

Michael Barbaro: Wow. But the fact that they grabbed it and this was the one that was sort of seen in the evidence created a lot of suspicions around this because if you look at the pictures of his body, they really clearly didn't match this noose that we'd seen a picture of at the time.

Charles Homans: That's right. And on top of all that, there's this huge problem which is the security camera system of the jail.

Charles Homans: There were security cameras spread throughout this unit where Epstein was being held. But a number of days before his death, there was a hardware failure which led to half of the cameras in this unit not recording anything. They could be monitored in real time, but they were not recording any video. And this meant that there were only really two cameras recording in the area outside of Epstein's corridor that captured any of the events that night. In other words, there are things we will never know because we will never look at the cameras,

Michael Barbaro: right? And that's raised this question of whether somebody could have gotten in in this blank spot in the tape and made their way to Epstein's cell and killed him.

Charles Homans: Right? And you know, one piece of evidence that people marshall to show that that would have been possible is this little enigmatic fragment of video from one of the two cameras that was actually recording that night. One of the two cameras, the one that we've spent the most time looking at, was trained on the common area of the SHU, including the desk where the guards were sitting, and it catches a little sliver of the staircase leading up to Epstein's cell. Around 10:40 that night, after Tovan Noel does her one round, we see this orange shape in the corner of the frame that appears to be moving up the staircase to the door to Epstein's hallway of the SHU. And it's there for a few seconds and it's gone. And you know, this has fueled a lot of speculation that maybe this is somebody sneaking into the hallway to get to his cell. So, we spent a lot of time with our colleagues from visual investigations looking at all the evidence here. You know, would it be theoretically possible for somebody to sneak into Epstein's cell unnoticed, uncaptured by cameras that night? And what we found is that there was a pathway by which somebody could have gotten up to the cell that would not have been caught on camera or you know would have accounted for this you know tiny sliver of movement. Anybody getting into the SHU that night though would have had to get through several locked doors. One of them was controlled remotely by a control center of the jail. People who would be watching this door on camera. The other is there were three doors that this person would have had to get through. All of which were opened only with a physical key. So, it's a pretty herculean task somehow getting there in the first place, let alone getting there without being detected by a camera, right? We're talking about, you know, Mission Impossible levels of of of difficulty here. You know, this would have had to involve a plot involving two whole separate, you know, areas of the jail. a very detailed knowledge of the security cameras and which cameras were working and which cameras were not working, who was monitoring which cameras, who had the keys, how to get those keys while not being on camera. We're talking about an extremely elaborate choreography. And we found nothing in our reporting to suggest that anything of this nature actually happened.

Charles Homans: I mean so in the end the simplest explanation of what happened here which everyone struggled to accept for quite some time that this powerful man who did terrible things and got away with it for so long enters prison and confinement and is horrified by it and decides he can't handle it and takes his own life. That seems to be not just the simplest explanation but the very likeliest.

Michael Barbaro: Right? We came away thinking, you know, was it theoretically possible there was an alternate explanation? Maybe. But there's simply no evidence that anything else happened. Whereas, you have to weigh that against, you know, this mountain of evidence showing that he was clearly intent on killing himself at the time.

Michael Barbaro: Have you accepted the explanation that he died by suicide?

Charles Homans: I have. I think that, you know, at this point, it is the rational way to look at what we know about this case and what we are likely to know about this case. I think there are a lot of unknowns that are going to remain unknowns. But the bottom line is that whatever reason there is to think that other things could have happened. There's simply not the evidence necessary to stand up a convincing alternate explanation of how he died. You know, it strikes me that when it comes to Epstein's death, people have been suspicious about the government, maybe for the wrong reasons. And just stick with me for a minute. The theory all along was that somebody killed Epstein in that jail and the government wanted to hide it, wanted to cover it up. Your reporting doesn't support that conclusion. But what your reporting does support is the conclusion that the government's incompetence in running this jail at lots of levels from staffing to failing to pick up all kinds of clues that Epstein left and right that he was suicidal to the number of contraband sheets in his cell the night he dies. That that allowed Epstein to kill himself quite likely. And that's the reason people should be mad at the government because its conduct in this jail, which it runs, let Jeffrey Epstein kill himself and evade justice. And the government had a pretty simple job here, which was to keep Jeffrey Epstein alive so that he could go to trial and so that there could be justice. And it completely failed to do that.

Charles Homans: I think that's right. And the government can do different things to breed suspicion. It doesn't have to just act nefariously. It can act indifferently. And I think in this case, just the inattention to the management of this jail breeds anger and breeds suspicion. And I think in the case of Epstein, what's remarkable about his death is that you can point to all these different factors that enabled him to kill himself ultimately. And it's really hard to find any of those that weren't an issue at this jail long before Epstein even walked in the door.

Michael Barbaro: The indifference preceded him and he was not exempt from it despite the fact that he's arguably the most famous and important prisoner in the system.

Charles Homans: That's right. And one of the kind of remarkable things about this whole case is that in a weird way, Epstein's death sort of shown a light on all these really chronic failures of this institution. you know, things that people much less famous than Epstein had been enduring for years before this in some cases. And in a perverse way, I something that Epstein's death did was really kind of highlight some of these really chronic issues in this jail that a less high-profile inmate would not have called nearly so much media attention to. And this jail actually was closed down not long after this in part because of all these, you know, chronic problems there. I mean, the MCC is no longer operational. MCC is no longer operational. And there was documented concern from the Bureau of Prisons that people who were working and staying in this jail were actually at risk account of its crumbling infrastructure. Just like very basic issues with this jail. And one thing those issues have done now in retrospect is really robbed us of closure in this very important case and really ensured that questions about this are going to persist no matter how much we do to try to come up with an answer. What actually happened?

Michael Barbaro: Well, Charlie, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Charles Homans: Thanks for having me.

Michael Barbaro: That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.