Late in the afternoon of July 6, 2019, about a dozen F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department officers gathered at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, waiting out of view of the tarmac so as not to spook their quarry. The day before, they received an email informing them that a private jet would be arriving at 5:20 p.m. Attached to the email was an arrest warrant for its lone passenger, Jeffrey Epstein.
Returning from Paris, Epstein was making plans on his phone: a trip to his private island in the Caribbean, a documentary interview with Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser. When the plane touched down, customs agents boarded to check the passports of Epstein and the plane’s two pilots. Then they escorted Epstein into the terminal, where an F.B.I. agent and a detective told him he was under arrest.
Epstein appeared shocked. He managed to send one last message to Bannon: “All canceled.”
Bannon wrote back immediately. “you r not coming in?” There was no reply.
As the F.B.I. agents drove Epstein to Manhattan, he asked two questions. “Is this sex trafficking?” “Is this about underage?” It was.
The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors had quietly opened a new investigation eight months earlier into Epstein’s activities in New York, focusing on victims who had not been interviewed in his decade-old sex-crimes case in Florida. While Epstein was abroad, he was indicted under seal on charges of trafficking minors for sex. If found guilty, he faced up to 45 years in prison — a sentence far worse than the 13 months he had served in Palm Beach after a plea deal in 2008.
“Oh, this is bad,” he said aloud as he was booked into federal custody. “This is really bad.”
An F.B.I. agent and a detective took Epstein to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail in Lower Manhattan, shortly after 9 that night. The newly arrived inmate caught the eye of a jail employee named Elba Torres as she passed his cell. Epstein appeared “distraught, sad and a little confused,” Torres reported in an email to the jail staff. When she asked him if he was OK, he replied that he was. “But I am not convinced because he seems dazed and withdrawn,” she wrote. “So just to be on the safe side and prevent any suicidal thoughts can someone from Psychology come and talk with him.”
Neither Torres nor anyone else on the jail staff seemed to have yet identified Epstein as a figure of note. But her memo, written in the early moments of his incarceration, documented an extraordinary reversal of fortune. Hours before, Epstein had been cocooned within a personal empire of luxury and influence that had for years seemed to operate effectively beyond the reach of the law. Now he was in an overcrowded federal jail in an inmate’s uniform, reduced to a Bureau of Prisons number: 76318-054. It was the beginning of a journey into darkness that would end 35 days later, in the early hours of Aug. 10, 2019, when a guard found him unresponsive in his cell, hanging from a noose made from orange jail fabric.
The New York City medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide. But seven years later, the theory that Epstein didn’t kill himself, that he was murdered by someone with an interest in keeping him quiet, is held by many people who agree about little else. A broader discontent and suspicion around the handling of his death helped prompt the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress with bipartisan support in November, which has since resulted in the disclosure of more than three million pages of Epstein-related documents, photos and videos.
These include tens of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of video gathered in the official investigations into Epstein’s death: an initial inquiry by Justice Department prosecutors with F.B.I. agents and New York City detectives and a yearslong investigation by the Justice Department inspector general, both of which concluded that Epstein died by suicide.
The newly released records have raised more questions about his death — but they have also offered the clearest opportunity yet to answer them. Over the years, The New York Times and other news outlets sued for records from these investigations, but even those hard-won documents were dwarfed by the volume of what was now public. Congressional action had made possible the fullest examination yet of Epstein’s death, and we set out to do it.
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