Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
Jeffrey Epstein, the Wall Street financier and convicted molester arrested for more sex crimes against minors on July 6, might have tried to commit suicide, a report from authorities in New York suggests.
Jailers found the bazillionaire sex pervert in his cell with marks on his neck, news reports say.
Epstein, a registered sex offender, is incarcerated in connection with a federal indictment for sex-trafficking minors. He paid the minors to have sex during “massages,” the indictment alleges.
Suicide Attempt
Epstein was locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan after a judge denied bail.
But on Tuesday, jailers found him unconscious in his cell with marks around his neck, the New York Times and other media reported, a sign that he might have tried to hang himself.
The Times reported that Epstein’s injuries aren’t serious. A source told the newspaper he suffered “bruising around the neck.”
The Bureau of Prisons, in an email on Thursday morning, would give no details about the incident, citing “privacy and security reasons.” The bureau said Mr. Epstein was still at the jail, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, and not in a hospital.
His lawyers had proposed allowing him to post a substantial bond and stay in his mansion guarded by 24-hour security, at his expense. Prosecutors opposed that proposal, arguing Mr. Epstein was seeking “special treatment” and trying to build his own private jail — a “gilded cage.”
News 4 New York, the NBC affiliate, reported that jailers found Epstein “semiconscious” and curled into a “fetal position.”
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
Sources told the station that Epstein might have staged a suicide attempt to get a transfer — perhaps to that “gilded cage.”
Then again, News 4 reported:
A fourth source said an assault has not been ruled out, and that another inmate was questioned. The inmate who investigators have talked to in Lower Manhattan facility has been identified as Nicholas Tartaglione, according to two sources. Tartaglione is a former police officer in Westchester County who was arrested in December 2016 and accused of killing four men in an alleged cocaine distribution conspiracy, then burying their bodies in his yard in Otisville in Orange County, according to court records.
Sources told News 4 investigators questioned Tartaglione, and the former policeman claimed not to have seen anything and insisted he did not touch Epstein, sources said.
The attorney for Tartaglione denied all the claims that his client attacked the financier, saying his client and Epstein get along well. The attorney added Epstein was seen today and appears to be fine.
“They are in the same unit and doing well,” said Bruce Barket, an attorney for Tartaglione. He said any claim that Tartaglione might have assaulted Epstein “is absolutely not true.”
The judge in the case, Richard Berman, denied Epstein bail, News 4 noted, after a search of his $77 million, 21,000 square-foot home turned up a bogus passport, diamonds and “piles of cash.”
The Charges
On July 6, cops arrested Epstein pursuant to a federal grand jury’s indictment of the billionaire sex fiend.
As The New American reported on July 8, prosecutors say Epstein paid girls under the age of consent for sex, and that Epstein’s employees and associates helped procure the victims. Prosecutors allege that Epstein committed the crimes not only at his massive manse in Manhattan, but also at his estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
From 2002 through 2005, the indictment alleges, Epstein “enticed and recruited, and caused to be enticed and recruited, minor girls to visit” the two homes to “engage in sex acts with him, after which he would give the victims hundreds of dollars in cash.”
In 2008, then-federal prosecutor Andrew Acosta cut a plea deal with Epstein to escape similar federal charges, which permitted Epstein to plead guilty to state charges, serve a short sentence, and register as a sex offender.
News of the deal resurfaced when the feds indicted Epstein again, which forced Acosta to quit as Trump’s labor secretary.
The federal indictment for which Epstein is jailed now does not allege that he forcibly raped the girls, but instead paid them, and turned some into recruiters.
But a woman who claims to have been one of Epstein’s victims told NBC that Epstein forcibly raped her.
The leftist media have tried to connect Epstein with President Trump, but Trump banned Epstein from his Mar-A-Lago estate because he “sexually assaulted a girl at the club,” a court filing says.
Epstein is tight with former President Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” jet 26 times, Fox News reported. Clinton claims to know nothing of Epstein’s crimes.
Photo: AP Images
