Staff at the prison where Jeffrey Epstein was held while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges committed “significant misconduct,” including potentially criminal behavior, creating conditions that allowed him to die by suicide in 2019, according to a report released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.
The report found that staff at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York failed to assign Epstein a new cellmate after he had been placed on suicide watch, failed to adequately supervise the Special Housing Unit where Epstein was held prior to his death and neglected to ensure the facility’s security camera system could record video, among other missteps.
“The combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performances failures documented in today’s report all contributed to an environment in which arguably one of the most notorious inmates in BOP’s custody was left unmonitored and alone in his cell with an excess of prison linens, thereby providing him with the opportunity to take his own life,” Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, said in a statement.
In addition, the report found that Epstein was permitted special accommodations not afforded to other prisoners, including the ability to make an unmonitored, unrecorded phone call the night before he died. After he met with his lawyers on Aug. 9, the night before he died, Epstein was allowed by prison staff to use an unrecorded phone line that is used by inmates to call their attorneys, according to the report. Epstein told a prison staffer that he wanted to call his mother, who died in 2004, and used the phone to call a number with a local 646 area code. A prison staffer told the inspector general that a male answered the phone, and the staffer gave the receiver to Epstein.
The person Epstein called, who isn’t identified by name in the report but is described as female, declined to be interviewed by the inspector general, but her lawyer told the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office that she was in the country of Belarus at the time of the call and that Epstein told her “the press had gotten crazy, and they discussed personal things such as books, music and hygiene while incarcerated.”
According to her lawyer, Epstein told her that “he loved her, to be strong, and that he would not be able to call her again for another month,” the report says.
Two prison staffers who were on duty in the Special Housing Unit the night Epstein died, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were previously charged with falsifying prison records. Those charges were later dismissed after they fulfilled deferred prosecution agreements. The report released Tuesday found four other staffers who either created false documentation or had a “lack of candor” or made false statements in connection — potentially criminal violations.
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute the employees who were found to create false documentation, according to the report. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the employees who allegedly displayed a “lack of candor” or made false statements would face prosecution.
While conspiracy theories have surrounded Epstein’s death since 2019, the New York City medical examiner previously determined that Epstein died by suicide and the FBI found it wasn’t the result of a criminal act. The inspector general’s report backed up those findings, saying that “While the OIG determined MCC New York staff engaged in significant misconduct and dereliction of their duties, we did not uncover evidence contradicting the FBI’s determination regarding the absence of criminality in connection with Epstein’s death.”