The Untold Story of Jeffrey Epstein’s Death

**Charles Homans** (0:00)
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**Charles Homans** (0:33)
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. 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 asks 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. 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.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:37)
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** (3:58)
Suspicions around Epstein's death have really been incredibly persistent from literally 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.
There's just a lot about the story that has not sat well with people ever since. 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** (4:33)
Right. It's a bipartisan view that hasn't really dimmed.

**Charles Homans** (4:37)
Right. This has been amplified online by literally everyone from Donald Trump to Hunter Biden at one point or another.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:44)
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** (4:51)
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 cascade of mistakes and technical failures and just weird mysteries around his death that was hard to, I think, take at face value for a lot of people. 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 a 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?