A federal judge in the United States has made public a letter allegedly written by Jeffrey Epstein before his death, marking the first official publication of the document.
According to American media, the letter was found by Nicholas Tartaglione, Epstein's former cellmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, after Epstein had unsuccessfully attempted suicide in July 2019, just weeks before he was found dead in his cell.
The content of the letter reads: "They investigated me for months, they found nothing!!! It's a luxury to choose your own time to say goodbye to life. What do you want me to do, burst into tears?! It's no fun, it's not worth it!!"
The letter is unsigned and it has not yet been officially confirmed whether it was actually written by Epstein. The US Department of Justice has not yet responded to its publication.
The document was declassified after the New York Times published an article last week about the existence of the letter and asked the court in White Plains, New York, to make it public.
Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer currently serving a life sentence for a quadruple murder, said he found Epstein unconscious in his cell. Epstein later claimed to prison authorities that Tartaglione had attacked him.
According to federal documents, in the weeks before his death, Epstein had insisted he had no suicidal tendencies.
Media reports say Tartaglione handed the letter to his legal team as a possible defense against future assault charges by Epstein. The lawyers then hired handwriting experts to verify the document's authorship.
The letter had remained sealed as part of Tartaglione's appeal case, due to protection from attorney-client privilege.
Jeffrey Epstein, a well-known American financier involved in major sexual abuse scandals, was officially declared a suicide by the New York medical examiner in 2019. However, his connections to powerful political and economic figures have continued to fuel conspiracy theories about the circumstances of his death.
