A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  Ever since he entered prison, he had been waving around his wealth. Just as it was a powerful elixir in the outside world, it allowed him to seduce hopeless prisoners so he could get what he wanted in the confines of MCC. This allowed him to get the space, time, and resources to do the dirty deed.

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  Some believe Epstein hanged himself but that, instead of being a suicide, it was a meticulously planned ruse by Epstein that went massively awry. An accidental death.

  “He was showing he was suicidal to get moved to a hospital,” said Laura Goldman, a friend of Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and alleged accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in an interview.

  “And why do I know that? Because I was there and that’s how I got out.”

  Goldman spent time at MCC in the 1990s after threatening a man who she claimed sexually assaulted her. She said she was able to get transferred to a mental health facility after an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

  After she learned that Epstein was locked up at MCC in July 2019, Goldman said she talked to Ghislaine’s sister Isabel about the incident.

  “I did mention when he was arrested, ‘You know that’s where I was, and I attempted suicide,’” said Goldman. “Ghislaine and Isabel both knew that.”

  Epstein’s first alleged suicide attempt in July had gotten him placed on twenty-four-hour suicide watch, but it hadn’t gotten him a transfer out of MCC, nor out of the notoriously dilapidated Special Housing Unit. Epstein would not have been a candidate for the facility’s general population because his safety would be at risk as such a high-profile prisoner accused of underage sex crimes.

  Epstein, a gifted manipulator, successfully persuaded MCC psychologists to take him off suicide watch after just a week. Would a second, botched attempt have shown that the prison couldn’t properly supervise him and be entrusted with his protection? Would his lawyers, the victims, and the public demand that he be transferred somewhere that could adequately ensure his safety?

  One of Epstein’s lawyers, Martin Weinberg, tore into the conditions at MCC during a court hearing shortly after his client’s death.

  “We think your Honor trusted the government, the Bureau of Prisons, to keep our client safe and keep him in civilized conditions,” said Weinberg. “I’ve called [MCC] medieval. There’s vermin on the floor. There is wet from the plumbing. There is no sunlight. There is limited exercise. It is simply conditions that no pretrial detainee—and I would go farther as a criminal defense lawyer—no United States defendant should be subjected to.”

  Epstein’s own list of grievances against the prison—the burned food, the bugs—were laid out in the legal pad left in plain sight on his cell table. Photos of his room after his death show that the top mattress from his bunk had been pulled onto the floor, where it was placed perpendicular to the bottom bunk. Why? Would it have been uncomfortable for him to rest his knees on the concrete floor while kneeling forward into the noose?

  Dr. Baden, the defense pathologist, estimated that Epstein died several hours before the guards reportedly found him at 6:30 a.m. Was Epstein expecting them to check on him during their mandatory 3:00 a.m. head count—the one they allegedly slept through?

  As someone familiar with the prison, Goldman thinks it’s a serious possibility.

  “Listen, it was a reasonable gambit, except for the fact they didn’t come and check on him, that had he attempted suicide twice, he either would have been moved to [a hospital], or Oklahoma where there’s a male mental health facility,” she said. “But his lawyers might have been able to get him out of that because they would have said they need him to help prepare for trial.”

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  It might be possible to explain away the failure of the cameras and guards as neglect. But it’s also possible that there was collusion, not for assisted suicide, but for someone to take out Epstein without his knowledge or consent. Or, as this theory is popularly known, “Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

  This was another alluring possibility. It made sense. Epstein had tales to tell about some of the richest, most powerful men in the world. And contrary to public speculation, those around him thought he was optimistic about his chances to get out of prison.

  “So the guy killed himself the next day, but on Friday he’s planning on fighting this case and he’s all pumped up about it?” his lawyer David Schoen said with some measure of disbelief during an interview.

  “I don’t buy into those conspiracy theories. I don’t think Bill Clinton killed him or Hillary,” he said.

  But Schoen does not believe that Epstein just up and offed himself, either. “I think it was just a regular, old somebody [who] killed him,” Schoen said at his Atlanta-area home. This meant a fellow inmate, rather than a politician who might have been compromised. In this theory, the deed was done by someone who did not want Epstein alive, but not necessarily for anything that had occurred outside MCC walls.

  “It would be that somehow a prison door is left open, is left unlocked. [Epstein’s] door and another prisoner’s door will be left unlocked,” said Baden. “And that prisoner can go in and do what he wants and come back out and nobody would be the wiser.

  “But it would require somebody to be active in it. One person would have to do that,” Baden added.

  MCC guards said cell doors are not locked electronically at the prison. Officers still carry old-fashioned Folger Adam keys that open the tier gates and the individual cell doors. Rivera revealed that it was possible certain cells could be “purposely unlocked and left unlocked” by a correctional officer or someone else with a key.

  “Whoever those two officers were, if they allowed somebody else to go in and do that to him. That’s possible,” said Rivera.

  “I honestly believe, if that did happen, it would have had to happen with the help of some of the staff. It’s almost impossible for somebody to plan that, or be able to get it off without help. You got to have some type of help.”

  This wasn’t the first mysterious death in this jail. On May 19, 2015, a prisoner at MCC named Roberto Grant died in custody while awaiting sentencing on robbery charges. Prison officials initially told Grant’s family that the thirty-five-year-old had died of a drug overdose while high on synthetic marijuana.1

  “He showed signs of being choked,” said Andrew Laufer, an attorney for Grant, in an interview. “His mother and his ex-wife came down to the prison to find out what happened. They told them it was an OD on K2, which it wasn’t.”

  The autopsy found no drugs in his system. But it did find signs of “blunt force trauma,” including signs of strangulation and injury to the hyoid bone in his neck. Still, the manner of death was ruled “inconclusive” by the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office.

  Like Epstein’s case, there was no surveillance footage available from Grant’s cell on the night of his death, said Laufer. Grant had also had bad relationships with some of the correctional officers, according to his lawyer. But his family, who sued MCC for $20 million, believes he was murdered, by either other inmates or guards, and his cause of death was covered up by prison officials.

  “I think [the prison has] been preventing us from finding out more information. I believe that they want to do anything but take responsibility for my client’s murder,” said Laufer. “And that goes for any other case I’ve had. I’ve had clients lose fingers in doorways—get chopped off. I’ve had clients get fractures. They never want to admit any wrongdoing. It’s always the client’s fault, as they always like to allege.”

  Laufer said he sees some similarities between the deaths of his client and Epstein. But in Epstein’s case, he said he wouldn’t rule out negligence by the guards.

  “My personal feeling, and until I see the additional evidence, is gross negligence. I see plenty of that there,” he said.

  Alan Dershowitz, who was still in regular contact w
ith Epstein’s legal team at the time of his death, said Epstein’s attorneys seemed to have a fairly strong case and were confident of their chances.

  “The thing that does surprise me is he was more of an optimist,” said Dershowitz. “He had a pretty good case. His lawyers told me he had a shot at winning. That’s why his lawyers don’t believe he killed himself.”

  Others, including the president of the United States and other politicians, openly suggested that Epstein’s death was somehow the result of foul play.2

  “I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Attorney General Bill Barr admitted in an interview.3 “I think it was important to have a roommate in there with him and we’re looking into why that wasn’t done, and I think every indication is that was a screw-up,” Barr told the Associated Press. “The systems to assure that was done were not followed.”

  The seemingly wild theories about Epstein’s death were not without some shred of scientific evidence. Dr. Baden took to Fox News to contradict the official narrative one morning in October 2019.

  “I think that the evidence points toward homicide rather than suicide,” he told the cable news channel.4

  Explaining the specific injuries suffered by Epstein that morning in his cell, Baden stated that they were “more consistent with ligature homicidal strangulation” than suicide. “Hanging does not cause these broken bones and homicide does,” he said. “A huge amount of pressure was applied.”

  Baden’s explosive findings were, for the record, rejected by New York City officials. “Our investigation concluded that the cause of Mr. Epstein’s death was hanging and the manner of death was suicide. We stand by that determination,” Sampson said in a statement to Fox News.5 “We continue to share information around the medical investigation with Mr. Epstein’s family, their representatives, and their pathology consultant.”

  But if, as the meme succinctly suggests, the government is hiding something and “Epstein didn’t kill himself,” then who killed him? It is incontrovertible that quite a few stood to gain by his death. The rich and famous, with much to lose, certainly feared that Epstein would sing to authorities. Rumors swirled that he had blackmail—videos, photos. By contrast, very few people, if any, benefited by having so many questions unanswered when Epstein died.

  There was another factor that led to the belief becoming so widespread. Epstein had gotten away with his crimes for so long, with hardly anyone paying any sort of price. Additionally, media and institutions had helped provide cover for him to operate with impunity. The idea that now, all of a sudden, the media could be trusted to tell the truth about Epstein after getting him so wrong for so many years belied belief for many around the country.

  Even after details of Epstein’s depraved crimes started to go public, his mysterious hold over some of the world’s most powerful men continued. He and Prince Andrew strolled together through Central Park, in full view of photographers, months after Epstein was released from house arrest for soliciting underage prostitutes. He also hosted the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers at his office and flew Bill Gates to Palm Beach on his Gulfstream jet. He dined with Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Chelsea Handler, and Woody Allen at his twenty-one-thousand-square-foot Manhattan mansion.

  These were just some of the big names caught up in a story driven by fraud, theft, and rape. Epstein’s death exposed at least some of the dirty secrets of how wealth, politics, celebrity, and the media enabled this predator to harm countless victims over the course of decades. And what other secrets might there be that would drive someone to drastic action in order to keep them hidden?

  Which is why most who knew Epstein, whether they liked him, were violated by him, or simply had a business relationship with him, believe he was murdered.

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  While there are a number of ways that Epstein’s murder in MCC could have been carried out, that still leaves wide open the question of who did it, or ordered it done. Given Epstein’s decades of sordid behavior and the many influential figures who crossed his path as it was going on, the list gets long fast. But the picture will become clearer after a look back at Epstein’s life, how he treated those he met along the way, and how key figures in politics, the media, and the intellectual elite still fear telling the truth about Jeffrey Epstein.

  5

  Blackmail

  Guests approaching Epstein’s home on the Upper East Side saw a sedate and gorgeous building with views of the Frick Collection, located across the street. They entered through fifteen-foot oak doors that emphasized the grandeur of this desirable New York address.

  The first thing they would see upon entering would give them quite a shock: an oil portrait of President Bill Clinton, wearing a blue dress and red high heels, sitting seductively in a chair in the Oval Office.

  “It was hanging up there prominently—as soon as you walked in—in a room to the right,” the New York Post quoted a source as saying.1 “Everybody who saw it laughed and smirked.”

  The painting, titled Parsing Bill, created by the artist Petrina Ryan-Kleid in 2012 and sold at Tribeca Ball, an arts school fund-raiser, is obviously a tongue-in-cheek mockery of Clinton’s most embarrassing and devastating moment as president—his Oval Office affair with a then intern who famously kept a semen-stained blue dress as evidence of her affair with the commander in chief.

  Beyond the sick joke, the message of the Clinton portrait seemed obvious: a warning to his rich and powerful guests that he had dirt on them, and that they had better do as he asked. Epstein was friendly with Clinton, proudly displaying this visual message to all his acquaintances. And he did not hesitate in his final years to explain to others that this was one way he maintained power.

  On August 16, 2018, Epstein invited a New York Times journalist to that very home to help spread the word.

  “The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use,” the journalist James B. Stewart would report.2

  Stewart added, “During our conversation, Mr. Epstein made no secret of his own scandalous past—he’d pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from underage girls and was a registered sex offender—and acknowledged to me that he was a pariah in polite society. At the same time, he seemed unapologetic. His very notoriety, he said, was what made so many people willing to confide in him. Everyone, he suggested, has secrets and, he added, compared with his own, they seemed innocuous. People confided in him without feeling awkward or embarrassed, he claimed.”

  The tell-all article was written after Epstein’s death, because the conversation occurred under an on-background agreement, which the writer asserted lapsed upon his interlocutor’s demise. (An agreement to keep comments on background is a condition that usually allows the reporter to use information learned from a source, and usually even quotations, as long as the source himself is never specifically identified.)

  And yet the conversation, as retold by Stewart, offers one of the clearest views into Epstein’s mind.

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  In 1995, a twenty-six-year-old by the name of Maria Farmer had recently taken up a job at Epstein’s New York mansion. Her job was to work the front desk.

  She noticed suspicious activity. “I saw many, many, many, many, many” young women coming to the house, she recalled in a 2019 interview with CBS.3

  “All day long. I saw Ghislaine going to get the women. She went to places like Central Park. I was with her a couple of times in the car . . . She would say, ‘Stop the car.’ And she would dash out and get a
child.”

  Farmer recalls that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged procurer, told her she was “getting Victoria’s Secret models.”

  Farmer was unsettled. “One day I said to Jeffrey, ‘What goes on in this house?’ Like, ‘Why are you always upstairs?’ And he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ And so he took me up there in the elevator. And we went—he showed me all of Ghislaine’s quarters.”

  In his own bathroom, Epstein had on display “a marble, like, altar thing over here, and he said that’s where he gets his massages.”

  He also showed her the intricate camera system he had set up throughout the house. “I looked on the cameras, and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed. I’m like ‘I am never going to use the restroom here, and I’m never going to sleep here,’” she told the news network.

  Epstein told her that the video footage from his house was meticulously stored and safeguarded. “I keep it. I keep everything in my safe,” he told her.

  Why, exactly, he chose to disclose his high-tech surveillance system to his employ is a matter of speculation. Perhaps Epstein wanted those he sought to overpower to know that he had dirt on them too. Regardless, Farmer would not be the only one to hear his boasts.

  One close friend said he asked Epstein to give his wife a tour of his home in New York a few years ago. During the visit, Epstein proudly boasted about the cameras he had in each room.

  “He gave [my wife and I] a tour. And all he kept pointing out was cameras. There were cameras everywhere,” said the friend in an interview.