Jeffrey Epstein report: ‘Significant misconduct’ by prison officials led to Epstein’s suicide

The Department of Justice has revealed “significant misconduct” by staff at a Manhattan detention centre led to Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide.

The DOJ’s  Inspector General found multiple prison staff members failed to check on the disgraced financier – despite him being on suicide watch.

Epstein died in 2019 while awaiting trial for underage sex trafficking charges.

Rachel Sharp has the full story.

In early June, the Associated Press was given access to a trove of documents from the federal Bureau of Prisons that documented Jeffrey Epstein’s final days in a Manhattan detention facility.

The documents shed new light on the lead-up to and aftermath of the infamous financier’s death.

They revealed an initial health screening recorded Epstein as suffering from sleep apnea, constipation, hypertension, lower back pain and prediabetes.

He had been previously treated for chlamydia and had reported 10-plus female sexual partners within the previous five years.

Sheila Flynn has more details.

Jeffrey Epstein died on 10 August 2019 inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where he was confined ahead of a pending trial for allegedly recruiting dozens of teen girls to engage in sexual acts with him and his friends. He was facing up to 45 years in prison if he was convicted.

Epstein was found with a noose made out of a bedsheet and the authorities ruled the death a suicide.

Speculation has run rampant that Epstein did not kill himself, though authorities ranging from the medical examiner to former US attorney general Bill Barr have publicly declared that Epstein did take his own life.

The death also set off fevered speculation online, where the story overlapped with the themes of the increasingly influential QAnon conspiracy movement, which believes a cabal of paedophilic Democratic and media elites are conspiring to harm children.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner in a “pyramid scheme of abuse”, has also stated she believes the 66-year-old was assassinated.

Josh Marcus has the details.

The Department of Justice has confirmed Jeffrey Epstein’s death in 2019 was a suicide resulting from “significant misconduct” at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.

Nearly four years on, his decades-long underage sex trafficking scheme continues to be the subject of litigation among the powerful people who were sucked into his orbit.

A sprawling lawsuit taken by the US Virgin Islands against JPMorgan Chase is due to go to trial in October.

The USVI accused the Wall St bank of having “pulled the levers” through which Epstein paid his network of enablers.

The lawsuit claims that JPMorgan concealed wire and cash transactions that were part of a “criminal enterprise” whose currency was vulnerable and desperate women and girls, groomed and recruited over decades by Epstein and his chief lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell.

JPMorgan have tried to shift blame for Epstein’s crimes onto high ranking USVI officials. Their lawyers have claimed in court that the USVI shielded him from accountability while “reaping the benefits of his wealth”.

The Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued the following summary of his findings into Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide.

“The combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures documented in the report all contributed to an environment in which arguably one of the most notorious inmates in Bureau Of Prison’s custody was provided with the opportunity to take his own life.

“The BOP’s failures are troubling not only because the BOP did not adequately safeguard an individual in its custody, but also because they led to questions about the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death and effectively deprived Epstein’s numerous victims of the opportunity to seek justice through the criminal justice process.

“The fact that these failures have been recurring ones at the BOP does not excuse them and gives additional urgency to the need for DOJ and BOP leadership to address the chronic problems plaguing the BOP.”

Mr Horowitz said the Bureau of Prisons had agreed with eight recommendations to improve management of correctional institutions.

A scathing report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General has explained why it concluded Jeffrey Epstein had died by suicide.

“The Medical Examiner who performed the autopsy detailed for the (Office of Inspector General) why Epstein’s injuries were more consistent with, and indicative of, a suicide by hanging rather than a homicide by strangulation,” the report states.

“The Medical Examiner also cited to the absence of debris under Epstein’s fingernails, marks on his hands, contusions to his knuckles, or bruises on his body that evidenced Epstein had been in a struggle, which would be expected if Epstein’s death had been a homicide by strangulation.”

The report found that corrections staff last checked on Epstein at 10.40pm on 9 August. He was found unresponsive nearly eight hours later at 6.30am on 10 August.

A damning report issued by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General on Tuesday found that a “combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures” allowed Jeffrey Epstein to take his own life in 2019.

These included failing to check on the disgraced financier despite him being on suicide watch, a violation of Bureau of Prison (BOP) policy which requires staff to check on all inmates in solitary confinement at least twice an hour.

The failures contributed to an environment where “one of the BOP’s most notorious inmates was provided with the opportunity to take his own life”.

Rachel Sharp has the full story.

On Monday, a federal judge in New York approved a $290m preliminary settlement in a lawsuit from alleged abuse victims accusing JPMorgan Chase of turning “a blind eye” to the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking ring.

The suit, filed in court last year on behalf of Epstein victims, under the name of an anonymous woman dubbed Jane Doe 1, accused the bank of ignoring Epstein’s troubled history, including continuing to do business with him for five years after the disgraced financier pleaded guilty in 2008 to child prostitution charges and registered as a sex offender.

Josh Marcus has more details.

Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed Bill Gates and threatened to expose his alleged affair with a Russian bridge player, according to a recent report.

The late paedophile threatened to expose the Microsoft co-founder’s supposed affair with Mila Antonova if Mr Gates didn’t reimburse him for tuition costs that Epstein had initially covered for the woman to attend a software coding school, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Epstein blackmailed Mr Gates in the form of an email in 2017, the report claims, after he failed to convince the world’s fourth richest man to join a multibillion-dollar charity fund that he attempted to set up with JPMorgan Chase.

The bombshell report adds weight to longstanding speculation that Epstein may have been extorting his powerful network of friends.

Read on for the full story.

Corrections staff at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center were found to have of committed “numerous and serious” instances of misconduct by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General.

Four Bureau of Prison employees were identified as potential having committed criminal offences by Michael Horowitz.

Two of those, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid prison time.

Investigators found they had altered records to make it look like they had performed checks on Jeffrey Epstein.

Charges against both men were dropped last year after they entered into a deferred prosecution agreement.

The report found two supervisors, identified only by their job titles, knowingly and willfully falsified records to make it appear as if they completed mandatory inspections of inmate locations on 9 and 10 August.

 “A combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures…all contributed to an environment in which arguable one of the most notorious inmates in BOP’s custody was provided with the opportunity to take his own life,” Mr Horowitz concluded.