For seven years, the note that might have answered the most-argued-over question in recent true crime history sat in the wrong case file. Not classified. Not destroyed. Just buried in federal court proceedings in White Plains, New York, tied to a convicted quadruple murderer while the rest of the world argued about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself or was killed.
Today, a federal judge finally unsealed it after The New York Times petitioned to make it public. Federal prosecutors backed the release.
And now that everyone has read it, the argument is louder than ever.
What the note actually says
One handwritten page. Seven lines, one of them too smudged to read. No official confirmation that Epstein wrote it.
Here is what is legible: “They investigated me for month — found nothing!!!” Then: “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” Then, at the bottom, the line that has already been screenshotted roughly ten million times: “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.”
“NO FUN. NOT WORTH IT!!” is underlined at the end.
That is it. That is the document that has been feeding conspiracy theories since before it was ever made public.
Who found it — and why that detail matters more than the note itself
Nicholas Tartaglione found the note. Let that sit for a second.
Tartaglione is a former Briarcliff Manor police officer convicted in 2023 of four murders. He lured his victims with the promise of a drug deal, killed them, and buried their bodies on property he controlled. He is serving four consecutive life sentences. In the summer of 2019, prison administrators placed him in a cell with Jeffrey Epstein. They were cellmates for nearly two weeks.
On July 23, 2019, guards found Epstein on the floor of his cell with a strip of bedsheet around his neck. Epstein survived. He initially told jail officials that Tartaglione had attacked him — an allegation he later stopped repeating and said he could not recall. After the incident, Epstein was moved to a different cell.
Tartaglione says he found the note tucked inside a book after Epstein was moved out. He gave it to his lawyers — not to investigators, not to the jail, not to the FBI. To his lawyers. Because if Epstein was going to keep accusing him of assault, a note suggesting Epstein had been planning to die could be useful. The note then sat in Tartaglione’s sealed case file for years. Few people knew it existed until Tartaglione talked about it on a podcast last year.
Federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York — the office that handled Epstein’s case — told ABC News they did not know the note existed. It was not mentioned in the official reports on Epstein’s death. It was not among the 3.5 million Epstein files the DOJ released earlier this year.
The one piece of paper that might have informed the official investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein died was sitting in a convicted murderer’s legal file the whole time.
The timeline that nobody is talking about
Here is the sequence of events that should be making your head hurt.
Epstein writes a note saying it is a treat to choose one’s time to say goodbye. He then attempts to die. He survives. He tells a prison psychologist — on the record — “I have no interest in killing myself.” Three weeks later, he is dead. The New York City medical examiner rules it a suicide by hanging. The DOJ concurs.
They concurred without ever reading the note.
Whether the note proves he was suicidal or proves he was murdered depends entirely on which corner of the internet you occupy. The people who believe he was killed point to “They investigated me for month — found nothing!!!” A man proclaiming his innocence hours before his first attempt, they argue, does not sound like a man at peace with dying. The people who believe he killed himself point to “time to say goodbye” and call it case closed.
Why this settles nothing
The note has no verified author. The man who found it had a legal reason to want it to exist. The lawyer who “authenticated” it in January 2020 has never explained how. There is no handwriting analysis in the public record.
What the note does is give everyone exactly what they already believed and nothing more. It is a document that spent years in a sealed file and emerged to confirm every prior conviction while challenging none of them.
Epstein is still dead. The note is still unverified. The smiley-face claim is still unexplained.