Holding the Line by Geoffrey Berman

Author:Geoffrey Berman [Berman, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Epstein never returned to 9 East Seventy-first Street—or slept anywhere other than the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

At 6:30 a.m. on August 10, 2019, just a little over one month from when he was arrested, guards discovered him dead, with a bedsheet around his neck. He was alone because his cellmate had recently been transferred.

I received the call early in the morning from the US marshal. The news he delivered was so upsetting that I could barely process it at first. We had worked so hard to bring Epstein to justice. I remained silent for a while. My wife asked who had been on the phone.

“Epstein is dead,” I told her. “They think suicide.”

My despair quickly turned to anger. “The fucking MCC has one fucking job—to keep our defendants safe,” I said. “And they can’t even get that right with their most famous inmate.”

I’m aware of all the conspiracy theories and have looked at them, searching for even a trace of plausibility. There isn’t any. Epstein was not murdered. His death was ruled a suicide because it was a suicide.

First of all, he had attempted to kill himself at the prison once before, less than two weeks into his stay. He was inexplicably removed from suicide watch six days later.

His cleverness served him to the very end. After the first attempt, he told a prison psychologist, “I have no interest in killing myself,” adding that he was a “coward” and “would not do that to myself.”

The psychologist wrote, “He stated he lives for and plans to finish this case and to go back to his normal life.” The report said he was “future oriented.”

He had two cellmates over the course of his stay, and the second was someone cooperating with us on an unrelated case. We talked to him afterward, and he told us that from talking with Epstein, he knew he was suicidal. He had even told Epstein, basically, “Do me a favor, buddy, I know you’ve got a problem, but please don’t do anything while I’m in here with you because you’re going to mess up my deal with the government.”

People who latch on to conspiracy theories often underestimate the role that rank incompetence plays in the events they want to attribute to some grand plan. Our office thoroughly investigated Epstein’s death.

On the night he died, the guards who were supposed to be monitoring him surfed the internet and engaged in online shopping. Cameras appeared to show them asleep at times.

I personally reviewed footage from the prison. There is not a perfect picture of his cell area, but during the whole overnight I could verify that nobody went in or out of the block where he was being held.

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