Nearly seven years have passed since Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan federal jail cell, and yet, week after week, the case somehow finds a way to get stranger. Just when you think the story has nowhere left to go, a new door swings open… and this week, it flew off the hinges entirely.
A purported suicide note, locked in a courthouse vault for nearly five years, was unsealed by a federal judge on Wednesday. It is unsigned. It is undated. It has not been officially authenticated by any law enforcement or government agency.
And now, the one person who knew Jeffrey Epstein better than almost anyone alive is calling the whole thing a fake. His brother, Mark Epstein, looked at that note and didn’t hesitate for a second. “It wouldn’t be hard to get some pro forger to forge a note,” he told Business Insider.
“That’s the easiest f***ing thing in the world to do.” That is not the quote of a man who needs a moment to think things over. That is a man who has spent nearly seven years convinced his brother was murdered, and who sees this note as just the latest piece in a puzzle designed to mislead the public.
A Cellmate With a Complicated Past
Before we get into the note itself, we need to talk about where it came from, because the source matters enormously here. The man who claims he found the note is Nicholas Tartaglione, Epstein’s former cellmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
Tartaglione is not exactly a neutral party. He is a former police officer who kidnapped and murdered four people, then buried their bodies on his upstate New York property. He is currently serving four consecutive life sentences.
He is also the man who, according to court documents, was present when Epstein was found on the floor of their shared cell on the morning of July 23, 2019, with a strip of bedsheet fashioned into a noose around his neck.
Tartaglione described what happened that morning on a podcast last year: “Jeffrey Epstein tried killing himself when he was in the cell with me. I woke up, I brought him back with CPR.” He then claims that, upon returning to the cell after the incident, he opened the book he had been reading and found the note tucked inside its pages.
Tartaglione said he discovered the note in a book in his cell after Epstein was found on July 23, 2019, on the floor with a strip of bedsheet around his neck. He passed the note to his lawyers.
According to a chronology in the Justice Department’s files on Epstein, Tartaglione told his lawyer about the note four days after the suspected July 23 attempt.
There is no indication that anyone alerted jail officials or Epstein’s representatives. Four days. And not a single word to jail staff or anyone connected to Epstein. That is an odd choice, even by the standards of this wildly odd case.
What the Note Actually Says
🔗 https://t.co/45fcy0Jqt8#JeffreyEpstein #UnitedStates #Justice #Trump #BreakingNews pic.twitter.com/1oE0ZQAvr9
— AFRICA EYE (@africaeye_org) May 8, 2026
The note reads, in part: “They investigated me for months – found NOTHING!!!” and “It is a treat to be able to chose ones time to say goodbye.” It is a short, difficult-to-read document. Unsigned. Undated. Barely legible in certain sections.
And yet, one phrase embedded in it has become the focal point of the entire authenticity debate: “Whatcha want me to do – Burst out cryin!! No Fun – Not Worth It!!”
That phrase is not random. It appears to be a reference to a 1931 Little Rascals short film “Little Daddy,” in which the character Stymie says, “Well, what do you want me to do, bust out crying?” when another character says that it will be their last breakfast together.
And here is the part that gives even the skeptics pause: in a September 2016 email to his brother Mark, Epstein wrote “whtchoo want me toodo – bust out crying” in response to news that their cousin had become a grandfather.
And in another message the following year to his childhood friend Terry Kafka, Epstein wrote, “Whatcha want me todo/bust out cryin.” This was a verbal tic, a recurring private expression that Epstein used in personal correspondence. It is not the kind of thing you stumble upon casually.
The Forgery Argument, and Why Mark Epstein Isn’t Dropping It
Here is where the story splits into two very different directions, and both of them are worth taking seriously. Mark Epstein’s argument is not simply that his brother would never write a suicide note. It goes deeper than that.
Mark Epstein told Business Insider that he does not recall those emails, but he would not be surprised if his brother referenced the show. He compared the show in the 1960s to “SpongeBob SquarePants” in its ubiquity. “Who didn’t watch ‘The Little Rascals’ in the ’60s when we were kids?” he said.
His point is pointed: the Little Rascals reference being in the note proves nothing, because that reference is now publicly available.
Mark Epstein said whoever forged the suicide note would have adopted his brother’s “voice” from the emails included in the Epstein files “to make it seem real.” “It’s public knowledge,” he said. “It’s in the emails. So they stole it from me to make it sound like it was him.”
But here is the snag in that argument that even those who distrust the DOJ cannot easily dismiss: according to the unsealing order, the note was originally sealed in May 2021… well before Epstein’s emails with the “Little Rascals” reference became public earlier this year.
If someone forged this note using details pulled from the Epstein files that only became public in 2026, how did those details end up in a document that was locked in a courthouse vault in 2021? That timeline creates a serious problem for the forgery theory, and so far, no one has offered a clear explanation for it.
The line that appears in the new note alleged to be written by Jeffrey Epstein in jail — whatchou want me to do, bust out cryin’? — looks to be a reference to an inside joke between his brother Mark and him pic.twitter.com/gbrqcDoN10
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) May 8, 2026
What the Handwriting Experts Found
Three forensic document examiners who reviewed the notes at the request of the Associated Press concluded that they have or appear to have common authorship, with shared characteristics between the note Tartaglione claims to have found and a separate note found in Epstein’s cell after his death.
That second note was shown publicly on CBS’s “60 Minutes” back in 2020, and its existence has never been disputed. The AP’s experts compared both documents and found the handwriting consistent.
One examiner ruled out Tartaglione as the author, finding “significant dissimilarities between his handwriting and the handwriting in question.”
A second examiner was more cautious, noting that Tartaglione’s writing samples showed “a wide range of variation” and that further examination was warranted, though he stopped short of naming him as a likely author.
The note has not been forged by the man who found it, according to at least one expert. That doesn’t answer who wrote it. But it narrows the field.
View this post on Instagram
The Uncomfortable Alternative View
Now here is the angle that almost nobody wants to say out loud, because it cuts against seven years of very loud skepticism. What if the note is exactly what it appears to be?
What if Jeffrey Epstein, facing decades in federal prison, wrote a note to a cellmate he had come to trust, stashed it in a book, survived the attempt, recanted everything to prison psychologists to avoid further scrutiny, and then completed what he started three weeks later?
Epstein told authorities he was beaten up and called a child predator, but he later recanted that story. In the days after, he told a prison psychologist that Tartaglione had not threatened to harm him and that he had no recollection of the incident.
The man who accused his cellmate of assault suddenly remembered nothing. The man who reportedly said “I have no interest in killing myself” on July 24 was dead by August 10. The psychological whiplash in those three weeks is real, documented, and strange.
The note itself, with its all-caps defiance (“Found NOTHING!!!”) followed almost immediately by resignation (“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye”), reads like someone who has done the math and accepted the result.
That is not the language of a man being framed. That sounds like a man who spent his entire adult life believing he was too smart, too connected, and too powerful to fall, and then finally understood that none of it had saved him.
‘Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!’ https://t.co/hI01hRDW8G pic.twitter.com/IEbOARdIr1
— 𝖒𝖆𝖑𝖉𝖜𝖞𝖓 (@amenet2004) May 7, 2026
The DOJ’s Silence Speaks Volumes
The Department of Justice told the judge in a letter that it had “no knowledge as to the accuracy of the factual narrative” and deferred to the court’s judgment. That is a remarkable thing for the department to say.
Millions of pages of Epstein-related documents have been released in recent months, yet this note was not among them. An official for the department said that because the note was part of Tartaglione’s court proceedings, DOJ officials hadn’t seen it before it was unsealed on Wednesday.
So the government’s massive Epstein document release somehow missed a note sitting in a Southern District of New York courthouse vault. A note that has been there since 2021. Whether that is a bureaucratic failure or something more deliberate is a question that deserves a direct answer.
The House Oversight Committee is currently interviewing high-level officials as part of its probe into Epstein and the federal government’s handling of the Epstein investigation.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who appears in the files and was Epstein’s neighbor in Manhattan, testified before the committee on the same day the note was unsealed. The timing, unintentional or otherwise, is the kind of thing that makes people’s heads spin.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was removed from her post in April amid criticism over her handling of the Epstein files, is also scheduled to appear before the committee.
The Note That Changes Everything… And Nothing
The hard truth is this: a single handwritten note, unsigned and undated, found by a convicted quadruple murderer and locked away for nearly five years, is not going to resolve a case that has consumed the public imagination for the better part of a decade.
It is one data point in a story full of contradictions, institutional failures, and people who had every reason to lie. Mark Epstein is not going to be convinced.
The conspiracy-minded will not be convinced. And the people who believed it was a suicide from day one will point to the handwriting analysis and call it settled. None of them will be entirely wrong.
The note does not close the book on Jeffrey Epstein. It just adds another chapter that raises as many questions as it answers. And given everything we have learned about this case, that is probably exactly how it was always going to go.