I legitimately cannot comprehend that anyone believes that the guy committed suicide.

The closest I can come is believing staff were paid off to let him do so, but I can only imagine the sorts of heads that would have rolled on his open and honest testimony. Yeah.

I absolutely believe it. It's far more plausible than the alternative.

I find that position _wild_.

Because incompetance is often more probable than malice. Without knowing baselines, like how often these procedures were broken in general, these don't mean much. What if this happened literally every day?

Yuuuuuuup. Good eye. It's pointless without knowing the trend, which is how conspiracy theories work.

Which sucks, because there are very real conspiracies out there, and the others are very often employed for cover. See also MiB / LSD experiments, where you dress up as Hasidic diamond merchants and visit whistleblowers with gargantuan amounts of experimental psychedelics. "Ha ha this guy thinks aliens are probing everyone"

Epstein, for his part, yeah, I agree, probably was actually part of a conspiracy, a fall guy for an entirely government run honeypot. However, I don't have any reason to think this is all true.

>>>It's pointless without knowing the trend, which is how conspiracy theories work.

What?

Conspiracy theories work specifically for seeing the trend over time.

For example, I have no memory for what I ate yesterday, but I can recall news stories from as far back as the 80s which corroborate malfeasance decades later.

Did you know that John McCain was a filthy grifting criminal who was involved in the savings and loan scandal, was a complete coverer for the Iran Contra debacle, and the CIAs BCCI money laundering scheme for their importing of drugs through Mena Arkansas, which was shielded by Bill Clinton, and for being a CIA minion was awarded the next POTUS position...

Look into BCCI and a name you might be familiar with, Khoshoggi not the dismembered journalist by MBS, but his relative who was the arms dealer that sold his yacht to... donald trump. Who bragged about the purchase on nightly entertainment TV.

"It's a big club, and you aint in it" -- George Carlin.

The CIA runs the USA, and the drug trafficking and child trafficking industry, and Israel runs the CIA... Guess who was handling Epstein ;; Maxwell (AKA mossad)

>>> Look into BCCI and a name you might be familiar with, Khoshoggi not the dismembered journalist by MBS, but his relative who was the arms dealer that sold his yacht to... donald trump. Who bragged about the purchase on nightly entertainment TV.

Damn, this is actually true. I just visited Wikipedia, and I did not expect what I learned there. I thought Jamal Kashoggi was just some journalist. I never looked into him.

Turns out:

-He worked at the Saudi equivalent of the CIA

-He's the cousin of Dodi Al Fayed (the billionnaire who died in the car crash with Princess Diana)

-He's the nephew of billionnaire arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi, who sold Donald Trump a $200M yacht

-His grandfather was the personal doctor of the king of Saudi Arabia

-Considering the amount of noise the US made about him, I also expected him to be a US citizen. But no, he wasn't even a US citizen. I've never in my whole life seen the US govt care this much about a foreigner dying abroad, even if they work for a US company.

-George Soros' Open Society Foundation sued the Saudi government over his death

I know HN is the sort of place where you get flagged for voicing your suspicions without linking some establishment-approved source that gives its blessing on a particular narrative. So I'll just say this: it feels to me me that this is a very surprising background for a mere journalist.

Good. Now go to wikipedia again and learn about Felix Sater, and you'll see that Trump was also collaborating with the CIA to make connections and business with the Russian oligarchs. The web goes deeper than you can imagine.

Just wait until we see an AI crawler the masses can use...

The next conspiracy will be AI code that is delivering information that cant be debunked regardless how (un)true.

Thats the AI we fear.

this is crazy interesting. but what's can be hypothesized based on that. all of that is basically just circumstantial at that.

Only circumstatioal if you havent been paying attention over time, which is the point -- only TIME can give you context

can you be a bit more specific, please. the story is he got killed because he was human rights activist and that's also why the US cared about him (which is of course not the full story)

> Did you know that John McCain was a filthy grifting criminal who was involved in the savings and loan scandal,

no, I'm neither from US nor overly informed about politics there but I would have expected to have heard about it from Trump's allies when the two where butting heads

They had already washed the story by the time trump was in play, so there was no need and McCain was heralded as a hero, and while he did some brave shit in vietnam, he was still a criminal puppet...

And dont get me started on the group that GHWB ran in vietnam... whats that guys name from the massacre? oh yeah, the head of DHS after it was created.

However, incompetence can be allowed to go unpunished if it helps the people with malicious intent. If it happened every day, then it's still a failure of the system and to my mind is indicative of a widespread problem of getting rid of inconvenient people.

> how often these procedures were broken in general, these don't mean much. What if this happened literally every day?

according to this Fox News article [1] his suicide was the first in 21 years.

1: https://www.foxnews.com/us/epstein-new-york-lockup-suicides

Let's say you're Epstein, and on this night of all nights, you don't have a cellmate and the guards have stopped checking in on you every 30 minutes. If you were suicidal wouldn't you take the opportunity?

The only remarkable coincidence here was that the cameras were malfunctioning. It's highly improbable that a jail camera system would be designed in a way that it can be switched off by frontline guards with no evidence of tamper.

found the mole on HN... tasked with spreading FUD about Epstein

/s

Plausible.

Highlights the focus being on the wrong part of the story (his death), when the events of his life are what need most scrutiny and tireless investigation.

Epstein's was the first recorded suicide at MCC in 21 years...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Correctional_Cent...

They had a near miss the month before when Epstein attempted suicide the first time.

You call it suicide attempt, but it seems Epstein said he was attacked by a cell mate that ended up being convicted of four murders.

"Epstein told lawyers that cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione ‘roughed him up’" -https://nypost.com/2019/08/14/epstein-told-lawyers-that-cell...

"Ex-officer who shared cell with Jeffrey Epstein convicted of quadruple murder" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/07/jeffrey-epst...

The problem is that telling people that you didn’t attempt suicide and that you are not currently suicidal is also consistent with someone who is, in fact, currently suicidal and wants another opportunity. that is to say, what he told his lawyers is not at all inconsistent with what supposedly happened later.

It’s also worth noting that it was the cellmate’s lawyer who asked that the camera footage of their cell be preserved.

Lastly, Epstein trying and failing to kill himself seems more likely than that particular cellmate trying and failing to kill Epstein.

I don’t think what really happened will ever be clearer than mud, unfortunately.

Did you notice cellmate means you are in the same cell? A suicide attempt but the cellmate said he saw or heard nothing? How big are these cells?

Even hardened common-law criminals find pedophiles beyond the pale and will often get violent with them, finding the guilt-by-association of being imprisoned in the same facility unbearable.

same for his farewell letter in case of actual suicide. why would a guy like him go down without smearing people he felt betrayed by?

I like this new meme of stating:

"I am in perfect health and have no intent of commiting suicide."

after one talks about a subject like this, lol.

I don't doubt that something fishy happened, but I also think that the repetition of those occurrences are something that fuels the fires of baseless conjecture. There is no comparison to a baseline. How scrupulous are the guards on a typical basis? What were the existing uptime statistics for the cameras?

Any statistics for noncompliance at any sizable organization are going to be non-zero due to the law of large numbers. That is just evidence that they exist and do things. The baseline for comparison here shouldn't be zero, it should be the normal statistics for compliance.

It doesn't really make much difference if those occurrences happened frequently, as it may well have been known that e.g. the guards often slept during their shifts and thus that prison was chosen to make it easy to get rid of embarrassing people.

Did these guards sleep more than guards at other prisons?

(again, I'm not saying you're wrong, just saying these arguments aren't statistically rigorous)

> Did these guards sleep more than guards at other prisons?

No idea.

It just seems a poor defence of the events of that particular night by also stating that it's a common problem.

I'm not defending the events, I'm trying to establish whether or not they are anomalous.

I didn't mean that you were defending anything. I just think that the various events are indicative of problems whether or not they are anomalous.

As a bad analogy, if a murder suspect was found to be carrying an illegal weapon on the night in question, it would hardly work in their defence for them to state they often carried an illegal weapon.

It's completely silly to use "how was a typical prisoner handled" as the baseline for what should have been expected with Jeffrey Epstein. There was extremely intense news interest, mainstream outlets were speculating that his testimony might bring down a huge swath of the U.S. ruling elite, and every conspiracy theorist in the world was predicting (correctly, as it turned out!) that he would never make it to trial.

I 100% agree that he should have been treated differently and that the whole situation overall was fishy. What I'm saying is that the anomalies may suggest different things in contexts of different baselines. Was compliance better than normal, worse than normal, or about the same? How did it compare to other places?

I just don't think it is good for public discourse to use out of context statistics, even (and especially) if they are right, because it emboldens others to do the same when they are wrong.

To put a little meat on the bone here in terms of what you're asking, this is the same prison that held El Chapo through his trial. If it was a sloppily run facility it seems unlikely it would have been chosen for that purpose. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but I believe successful suicide attempts at the MCC were also very rare, as in, Epstein's was the first in 20 years or something like that.

That's the sort of information I find 100 times more convincing than a list of events out of context.

So stating reasonable conjecture is bad because it fuels baseless conjecture? This doesn't sound like your milieu.

From the same reference article about Epstein's Death :

"...In 2020, associate Jean-Luc Brunel was arrested and charged with the rape of minors by French prosecutors. He later died from an apparent suicide before his trial could proceed..."

Martin Armstrong was beat unconscious there.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/the-secret-cyc...

"At one point, a fellow-inmate beat him in his cell. (Armstrong suspects that it may have been an assassination attempt.)"

Martin recently wrote an interesting book about banker and politician meddling in Russia.

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/russia...

I'm not arguing that he wasn't murdered.

I'm arguing that "two broken cameras" means nothing without context.

> a guard would look into the cell every 30 minutes. These procedures were not followed on the night he died.

Were these procedure followed at every other time?

I don't see the relevance of that question. If that site was known to have guards that didn't follow procedure, then maybe that was the reason that it was selected.

> I don't see the relevance of that question.

The clear implication of the sentence “These procedures were not followed on the night he died.” is that the procedures were generally followed at all other times. But it is only implied, not explicitly stated, which is the kind of weaselly language used when someone is trying to convince others of something when they don’t have enough facts to present.

> If that site was known to have guards that didn't follow procedure, then maybe that was the reason that it was selected.

Yes, that’t true. Was that site known for that? Also, that’s not the argument originally presented, as I explained above; you’re jumping from argument to argument.

> The clear implication of the sentence “These procedures were not followed on the night he died.” is that the procedures were generally followed at all other times.

I'd agree that it is one reading of it, but it can also be read as simply stating a fact about the night in question. Whether the procedures were often neglected does not change the fact that a procedure to avoid suicides was not followed when they could have made a difference.

The person who wrote that sentence is here on HN and can probably answer for themselves. No need for you to come up with convoluted possible interpretations.

Hardly convoluted when the sentence states one fact about one night.

If it had been written as "These procedures were not followed on just the night he died.", then I would agree with you.

The insertion of the word “just” would change the sentence from an implication to an explicit statement; there would be no room for ambiguity.

"Two cameras in front of Epstein's cell also malfunctioned THAT night."

From what I've read that was debunked. Initial reports said two cameras could not recover footage but one of them was later restored. No one know how long it was malfunctioning. No cameras were ever pointed at his cell, these were just cameras in the vicinity and there was plenty of recovered footage for the corridor showing that no one approached his cell

"FBI studies two broken cameras outside cell where Epstein died" - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-jeffrey-epstein-ca...

They had a backup that incredibly also had a "technical problem".

"Jail CCTV erased by 'technical errors'" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205

Were backups ever successfully restored, for any purpose previously?

That seems like the only remaining "plot hole", from a technical perspective.

That was the initial report. They later recovered footage from one of them. The tale has also been misreported as being "the two cameras" when it was really "two of the many cameras". The investigators said they had ample footage from the area to prove no one approached his cell.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-jail-cell-fo...

This is the same Justice Department, that left the most important prisoner in the United States at the time, die under their guard. Their claim this is the correct, or only footage would be greatly enhanced if the FBI would publish the finding of this investigation:

"FBI studies two broken cameras outside cell where Epstein died" - https://web.archive.org/web/20200622111206/https://www.reute...

Why would he be considered an important prisoner? Note that we as of yet have absolutely zero evidence he was doing anything for anyone besides himself and Ghislaine Maxwell. Everything everyone has chosen to believe about his massive pedophile web is based on hearsay.

> Why would he be considered an important prisoner?

You should make a new account titled "PlausibleDeniability".

At the very least, a very persistent Devil's advocate.

a high security prison doesn't have any superfluous access corridors. there is usually one way to get somewhere and that way is highly secured and guarded. the people who would perform a stunt like staging a suicide certainly aren't regular guards but persons who usually do not walk around there. so, it makes a lot of sense to have also those main cameras accidentally fail.

You're making up the notion that the "main cameras" failed. We don't know which camera it was. And again, the investigators said they could clearly see all approaches to the cell in the recovered footage.

That is not what was written in the indictment document available from the Business Insider article you linked. What it says, is that there is video evidence the guards did not enter the tier where Epstein was housed.

I have seen enough Law & Order episodes to know contract killings are always done by a prisoner already inside the wing.

As this was a prisoner know to cajole with a past US President, and also the current US President at the time, a professional and competent police investigation would take it further.

Like say...Could it be possible the cell of another inmate was left open by accident? Any other inmates present at the time known to kill people by strangulation? Tracking the bank accounts and private life of the characters closely related to the events at the time? Like prison guards, lawyers, prison administrators and inmates? Anybody suddenly taking trips to Dubai and Vegas?

Lamentable - the careers of the officers involved will be stained.

On another topic, helping a monster to do the right thing is, in a moral sense, not that bad. Maybe by cashing out his holdings, the victims can be helped. So, much good will also happen.

> Lamentable - the careers of the officers involved will be stained.

You would think so, but: https://apnews.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-prisons-new-jerse...

Any reasonable review shouldn’t leave out the minor detail that Epstein had attempted suicide a month prior. Not saying that that should eliminate all suspicion, but it’s certainly a pretty huge piece of context to leave out.

Thank you. There is such an overwhelming number of these details it becomes very difficult to remember all of them.

Any reasonable review shouldn't assume any validity of the first "attempt" given the improbable series of "accidents" the night of his death. If anything, it is more likely it was fabricated or used to support the narrative. I mean, the guy had dirt on billionaires and ultra-powerful politicians and you want to be believe it was an actual suicide? That approach would produce such bad investigations.

Without the first attempt, we wouldn’t be talking about many of the suspicious procedural and technical failures that occurred with the successful attempt, because he wouldn’t have been moved and placed on suicide watch. Your explanation doesn’t make sense because it would have made the job harder and introduced more suspicion and none of it would have been difficult to foresee.

The crooked, drug-running cop who was Epstein's cellmate (and charged with murdering four people in a drug conspiracy) was quietly spared the death penalty in December last year, with no reason given: https://www.lohud.com/story/news/2022/12/14/nicholas-tartagl...

the tape covering the first attempt got accidentally deleted due to a "data entry error"

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/795004811/video-outside-cell-...

well, how do you know there was a first attempt. because there's a tape ... there was a tape. it got accidentally deleted due to a "data entry error" :)

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/795004811/video-outside-cell-...

His associate, Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modelling agent, was found dead in his prison cell too.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60443518

These facts are alarming, but don’t we need to have some sense of the base rates for these events to determine how unusual their confluence is?

For example, how often are cell mates transferred? How common is it for a prisoner to go a night without a cell mate? How often do guards actually do mandated checks (versus what they say since apparently they falsify records at least sometimes)?

I can imagine this being a murder, but I can also imagine an environment where “mandated” checks are just a box on a form that gets checked with no connection to reality.

One base rate we might have is the number of suicides that happen at this facility (apparently almost none) which does lend some credence to the murder theory.

I feel the facts you highlight would be more convincing if there was public information we could use to put them in context (and hey maybe there, if someone knows about it, please share).

Comparing the situation to normal occurrences, when everyone in the entire nation, presumably also the guards, knew he was a high-profile prisoner?

Maybe?

If guards never do their checks, an average prison camera fails once a month, and prisoners spend on average 1 night every 3 weeks without a cell mate, it puts the GPs facts in a certain light. If the base rates for those events are higher or lower, it puts in a different light.

The fact that Epstein was “high profile” is another fact to consider but I don’t see why it would obviate considering other data.

didn't the missing CCTV footage turn up?