Report on Epstein’s death finds errors and mismanagement in Manhattan jail

Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in 2019 in a cell with a sheet tied around his neck, died by suicide, not foul play — after an accumulation of negligence and mismanagement at the now-closed Manhattan federal prison where he was housed, according to to the Inspector General of the Ministry of Justice.

The Inspector General, who released a report Tuesday after a years-long investigation, found that the leadership and staff of the prison, the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center, created an environment in which Mr. Epstein, a financier accused of sex trafficking, had every opportunity to commit suicide.

The Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, referred two facility supervisors responsible for ensuring Mr. Epstein’s safety for criminal charges by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York after they were caught forging data and lying to researchers. But prosecutors declined to press charges.

While the Inspector General concluded that prison staffers were “guilty of significant misconduct and dereliction of duty”, investigators – who searched 100,000 files and conducted dozens of interviews – found “no evidence” to contradict the finding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Mr. Epstein had died by his own hand, with a homemade noose.

What they did find was a remarkable and largely inexplicable sequence of circumstances that made it easy for Mr. Epstein to commit suicide. For reasons that are unclear, prison staff allowed Mr. Epstein to hoard extra blankets, bedding, bedding, and clothing, despite the fact that he had previously attempted to hang himself.

And they violated a standing order designed to prevent Mr. Epstein from harming himself by allowing him to remain alone in his cell for a full day after his cellmate left — after an official emailed 70 employees from the Bureau of Prisons to warn them that according to the report that was dangerous.

The Inspector General’s report comes nearly four years after Mr Epstein, 66, was found dead in his cell with a sheet tied around his neck. The coroner ruled the death a suicide. Mr. Epstein was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges, and if convicted, would face up to 45 years in prison.

Almost immediately, an explosion of conspiracy theories suggested he was killed because of possible secrets he held and his connections to politicians and Wall Street titans.

Two days after Mr. Epstein’s death, Attorney General William P. Barr said there was “serious irregularities” in jail. He later attributed the death to “a perfect storm of errors.”

Mr. Epstein’s death occurred just over two weeks after he was found in his cell with bruises around his neck in a possible suicide attempt. That came the week after a Manhattan federal judge denied Mr. Epstein’s request to be released from house arrest at his Upper East Side estate pending trial. The judge ruled that if Mr. Epstein was released, he would continue to abuse teenage girls.

The Bureau of Prisons has never made a public statement as to why Mr. Epstein was able to commit suicide while in government detention.

But a 2021 investigation by The New York Times, based on thousands of pages of internal Bureau of Prisons records obtained after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government, found incompetence and carelessness on the part of some prison officials and failure to discover of hints that Mr. Epstein was becoming increasingly despondent.

The leads led to too little action by prison and bureau officials, who made mistake after mistake leading up to Mr Epstein’s death, The Times reported.

Prosecutors later charged two correctional officers with leaving Mr. Epstein unsupervised in his cell the night before his suicide while they spent their time surfing the Internet and appearing to be asleep.

The government accused the two guards of falsifying prison records to cover up their failure to carry out their duties. The guards eventually made deferred prosecution agreements and the charges have since been dropped.

Mr Epstein was taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center on July 6, 2019, after being arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where he had flown on a private jet from Paris.

Mr. Epstein was charged in a federal indictment with recruiting dozens of teenage girls, some as young as 14, to perform sexual acts on him at his Manhattan mansion and estate in Palm Beach, Fla., killing each of paid them hundreds of dollars in cash.

He also paid some of his victims to recruit additional girls, allowing him to “create a huge network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit,” the indictment said.

The Metropolitan Correctional Center, a maximum-security federal prison in Lower Manhattan that has long been criticized for its poor conditions and inhumane treatment of inmates, has since closed and its inmates have been transferred to other facilities.