On August 10, 2019, Mark Epstein was eating breakfast at a hotel in Norfolk, Virginia, when he saw a breaking news story on CNN that his older brother, Jeffrey, had supposedly committed suicide while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan.
Mark is a retired real estate investor and businessman. At the time of his brother’s death, he says that he was on good terms with him and talked to him over the phone but says that he did not follow all the details of his legal case and had not seen him in person in about seven years.
When Mark heard news about Jeffrey’s death, he boarded a plane and was the one who identified his body.
At an X-space discussion with Live Radio 1 on November 11, Mark asserted that, at first, he thought that his brother had committed suicide, as the FBI and other government agencies claimed.
“I had no reason to doubt it [the suicide claim]. He was facing a long time in jail,” Mark said. “The life of a convicted pedophile is not very pleasant and Jeffrey was used to living life the way he wanted, with people around who catered to him and took care of him….He had no kids, our parents are gone; he didn’t have anyone to worry about. I thought he took the decision not to go through a trial and potential prison sentence, and decided to take himself out.”
Mark said that, when he hired the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, he expected Baden to confirm that his brother had committed suicide. However, he said that Dr. Baden instead said he couldn’t call it a suicide because it “looked too much like a homicide.”
Dr. Baden told 60 Minutes that fractures found in the autopsy photos under Jeffrey’s neck and jaw were inconsistent with a suicide hanging. Baden said: “Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures [as Epstein did].”[1]
Dr. Kristin Roman, the New York City pathologist charged with doing the autopsy, came out of the autopsy, like Dr. Baden, saying that Jeffrey’s death looked more like a homicide than a suicide.
The initial death certificate said, as cause of death, “pending further study.”
Mark said that Dr. Baden and Dr. Roman’s assessments did not appear in a June 2023 Department of Justice (DOJ) report.
The DOJ report relied on the assessment of New York’s Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, who Mark said was not present at Jeffrey’s autopsy and never saw his body, though she said that his death was caused from suicide by hanging.
Mark said that he does not believe that Dr. Baden’s name even appeared in the DOJ report. He also said that he found a number of statements made by William Barr, the U.S. Attorney General at the time of Jeffrey’s death, to be untrue.
Most curious to Mark was Barr’s claim that he had watched video footage from outside the tier where Jeffrey was staying and that, because nobody was seen going in and out of the tier in the video, he became convinced that Jeffrey died by suicide.
Mark said that, when he heard Barr say this, he knew this was a cover-up of some kind.
Barr ignored the fact that 12 or so other prisoners were housed on Jeffrey’s tier who could have killed Jeffrey and then returned to their cell.
That night, it was actually reported that cell doors were left unlocked in Epstein’s tier.
Additionally, the video Barr allegedly saw did not show the actual door to the tier that is known to exist, meaning that someone could have gone through the door without being caught on camera.
A CBS News analysis of the video contradicted Barr’s claims that the footage clearly showed no one entering the area near Epstein’s cell before he died.
The video on the night of Jeffrey’s death showed, just before 10:40 p.m., an orange shape moving up the stairs leading to Epstein’s area.
A 2023 report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) concluded that the figure is a prison guard handing out bed clothes.
However, video forensic experts who reviewed the video for CBS believes it could be a prisoner in orange prison garb climbing the stairs toward Epstein’s unit.
Mark said he finds it suspicious that the Attorney General would take the time to watch the video directly and then misrepresent it.
He considers it to be highly plausible that the killer—who had either been placed in Jeffrey’s tier beforehand or was the orange-clad figure shown in the video that Barr somehow missed—was transferred to another prison right after killing Jeffrey and then was released or disappeared.
Mark said that, this past year, a number of pathologists have been studying Epstein’s autopsy and related pictures of the body and have confirmed that the death could not have been caused by suicide. This, he said, will be revealed publicly in the future.
One additional important thing that convinced Mark that his brother was murdered was the fact that he had a bail hearing coming up based on his appeal of a previous bail decision.
At the hearing, Jeffrey and his lawyers were planning to propose that they put up what would have amounted to the highest bail in U.S. history.
Mark said that he could “see that Jeffrey might have committed suicide if he had lost the bond hearing and didn’t want to sit in prison for a year while waiting for his trial. But it would have made no sense for him to have killed himself before the hearing.”
Mark continued: “If the judge granted him bond, he would have been able to live in his house with an ankle monitor and guards manning the place and cameras. This wouldn’t have been that terrible, especially since his house is real nice. So why would he take himself out if he had a chance to spend a year in his house awaiting trial.”
A “Perfect Storm of Screw-ups” and Evidence Tampering
Epstein’s death was surrounded by what Bill Barr called “a perfect storm of screw-ups” that raise suspicion of a larger conspiracy.
The most notable of the screw-ups was that the guards to Epstein’s cell, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel, fell asleep on duty and failed to perform checks that were supposed to occur twice every hour.
Thomas and Noel were later charged with falsifying records, saying that they had checked on Jeffrey through the night.
An additional screw-up was that the cameras on Epstein’s floor malfunctioned. The fire alarm in the building was also suspiciously inoperative the morning of Epstein’s death and Epstein’s cell had additional beddings and linens whose presence has never been explained.
A 60 Minutes investigation found that two nooses that were photographed in Epstein’s cell following his death showed both ends of the noose folded and hemmed and not cut. This was significant because the guards who allegedly found Epstein said they had cut the noose with scissors so they could get him down before trying to revive him.
Something else that is suspicious is that there is evidence of tampering with the video footage of Epstein’s tier, which had been seized by the FBI after Epstein’s death and then re-released. One scene from the video significantly has a cursor onscreen. A report by the website Wired also alleged that nearly three minutes of footage from the video appeared to be missing.[2]
Crime Scene Cover-up
In a clear sign of a cover-up, Epstein’s cell was cleaned and sanitized immediately after his death and before the FBI could gather evidence.
Standard police procedure in the case was generally not followed. Epstein’s body was moved by prison staff.
No photographs were taken of his remains in the cell or of his position at the point of death, and no tests were carried out for poison or DNA in Epstein’s cell.
Witness statements were not immediately secured and staff at the prison were interviewed only months later, with lawyer coaching.
Additionally, computer servers in Epstein’s wing were not secured and the hard drives were removed and then replaced that night.
Official Suicide Ruling Is Unfounded
Police experts—in differentiating a murder from a suicide—look at the position of the knot in the hanging cord and whether drool spilled to the ground, which would indicate suicide.
Since the crime scene was wiped clean in Epstein’s case, none of the tell-tale signs of suicide were prevalent, discrediting the DOJ and FBI’s suicide conclusion.
Ali Clark Investigation
Ali Clark is a professional investigator, with experience tracking intelligence agencies, who works as a researcher for Mark Epstein.
In a packet prepared for congressional leaders, Ms. Clark stated that “standard forensic procedure requires preserving, testing, and verifying all physical evidence with the possibility of criminal involvement in mind until it is conclusively ruled out. This did not occur in this [the Epstein] case. Instead, the government relied on assumptions, omissions, and procedural violations that suppressed or eliminated evidence. These inconsistencies, anomalies, and breakdowns destroyed the ability to determine whether Epstein was killed, coerced, or assisted in his death.”
Ms. Clark went on to note in her dossier that the OIG report openly admitted that the OIG staff did not investigate how Epstein died, only policy failures at the jail.
Ms. Clark discussed numerous additional anomalies, including the fact that inmate movement and logs on the night of Epstein’s death contain inconsistencies and may have been tampered with.
Ms. Clark concluded that the police investigation was “biased from the start—designed to close [the case], not uncover truth.”
She noted further that the irregularities in the case “collectively form a cascade of failures that suggest not incompetence but orchestration. It looks like a narrative patched together after the fact to fit a pre-decided conclusion of suicide….”
More Missing Video Footage and a Ghost Prisoner
Mark Epstein was told that there was someone with a hand-held video camera taping in the prison infirmary and in the hospital where his brother was brought in. The person was identified as Lieutenant Andrew Cisco in DOJ paperwork though the content of his video has been publicly suppressed.
In a review of prison logs, Ms. Clark amazingly found, sandwiched between guard reassignments and management cancellations, an advanced assignment for a medical escort nine hours before Epstein was killed.
Ms. Clark has come to believe in the possibility that an unlogged or ‘off-the-books’ inmate was temporarily moved into Epstein’s tier for a specific operational purpose and then removed from the system altogether, whether through transfer, quiet release, or some other disposition.
That scenario is not merely hypothetical.
The count slips and housing records she and Mark have reviewed contain anomalies consistent with a “ghost inmate” being used to reconcile headcounts on paper without a corresponding, verifiable body in a bed.
In plain terms: the paperwork balances, but the underlying records don’t – and that gap has never been credibly explained.”
An additional curiosity is that one of the guards at the MCC is known to have worked overtime on the day Jeffrey was killed though was not listed in the overtime logs.
This guard did not scan his badge between August 6 until late in the day of August 10 even though he was known to have worked during that time.
Pattern of History
The cover-up surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s death fits an unfortunate pattern in U.S. history—where politically related assassinations have been routine.
White House Special Counsel Vince Foster’s July 1993 death was also framed as a suicide despite evidence indicating that the death scene was tampered with, and that Foster was murdered by the same dark forces that may have been behind Epstein’s death.
Foster had been a partner with Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and knew about the Clinton’s illegal money-laundering and gun- and drug-running operations out of Mena, Arkansas, that were part of the CIA’s Contra war in the 1980s.[3]
Another whistleblower whose murder was made to look like a suicide was journalist Danny Casolaro, who had investigated the CIA’s theft of computer software that was used to carry out sweeping surveillance and money-laundering operations in banks that used the software.
Mark Epstein’s efforts to uncover the truth about his brother’s death is reminiscent of Henry Forrestal, a successful businessman like Mark who became convinced that his brother James, the first post-World War II Defense Secretary, was murdered. (The government’s claim was that James jumped from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 22, 1949).[4]
Henry had visited with James before his death and found him to be excited at his scheduled release from the Bethesda hospital. He was ready to publish his diaries, which would have incriminated high-level government officials in corrupt practices—including deception of the public in the December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attacks.
Henry said that James was “the last person who would have committed suicide, had absolutely no reason for taking his life,” and that “the whole affair smelled to high heaven.”
Just like the Epstein case.
In the official story, Forrestal had tried to first hang himself after attaching his bathroom cord to the radiator.
However, no evidence suggested the cord was ever attached to the radiator and Forrestal was found with the belt of his dressing gown tied tightly around his neck, indicating he was strangled and then thrown out of the window.[5]
A military investigation that was only declassified in 2004 revealed that Forrestal’s nurse saw shards of broken glass on Forrestal’s bed—indicating a struggle.
Afterwards, no suicide note was found, like in Epstein’s case, even though Forrestal was a prolific writer. His room was also cleaned, like in Epstein’s case, so crime-scene evidence could not be obtained.
The Bethesda hospital commandant, a Navy psychiatrist, and the Montgomery County, Maryland, coroner all publicly called Forrestal’s death a suicide—in violation of the basic investigative rule of police that all violent deaths should be treated as murders until sufficient evidence is gathered to prove otherwise.
This same investigative rule was violated in Jeffrey Epstein’s case.
Media Complicity in the Cover-up
A common thread in all of these cases is not only the compromising of police investigations but also of the media, which has almost universally advanced the official narrative and has frequently smeared independent investigators and whistleblowers.
The latter have often been branded as “conspiracy theorists”—a term that was weaponized by the CIA in the 1960s in an attempt to disparage critics of the Warren Commission Report, which was initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963 to convince the public that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone culprit in the JFK assassination.
In the Epstein case, liberal media outlets have in some cases tried to associate critical assessments with “conspiracy-oriented right-wing” media outlets, such as Fox News and the New York Post, which have tended to be more inquisitive on this matter.[6]
This approach may be designed to get liberals to defend the status quo and stand behind police-intelligence agencies that are complicit in Epstein’s murder and thoroughly corrupt.
Intelligence Agency Involvement?
If Epstein was indeed murdered, as the evidence indicates, the million-dollar question remains: Who did it?
The sophistication of the operation and large-scale police and FBI cover-up indicate intelligence agency involvement.
The latter is not surprising in light of Epstein’s involvement in what appears to be a covert honey-trap operation that his trial could have helped publicly disclose. It could have also disclosed Epstein’s involvement in other secretive covert operations that may have been connected with the honey-trap operation, some of which are now coming to light.
The goal of the honey-trap operation—which fits with a long modus operandi of Western intelligence agencies—was likely to build a video database of sexually compromised political leaders, oligarchs and influential celebrities who could be manipulated and controlled by blackmail.
The FBI is known to have seized tens of thousands of hours of videos containing incriminating evidence of sex by prominent people with underage girls, i.e., children, that Epstein himself was privy to.
Epstein’s honey-trap operation is thought to have originated with his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert—a British and Israeli intelligence operative whose funeral was attended by six Mossad heads—back in the 1980s.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence official, claimed to have seen Jeffrey Epstein in Robert’s office in the early 1980s. Their introduction came by way of Ghislaine who was involved with him in Israeli intelligence.
At the time, Epstein was allegedly bankrolling a software program connected to Israeli military intelligence, which was marketed for critical electronic infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad.
Ben-Menashe told Zev Shalev, a former CBS News executive producer, that “these guys [Epstein and Maxwell] were seen as agents…They found a niche for themselves—blackmailing Americans and other political figures….He was taking photos of politicians fucking fourteen-year-old girls—if you want to get it straight. They would just blackmail people like this.”
When Epstein got a sweetheart plea deal after being charged in Palm Beach, Florida, for sex crimes in July 2005, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta stated that he had been “told to back off” because Epstein was “above his pay grade and belonged to intelligence.” Acosta was rewarded by becoming Secretary of Labor for Epstein’s old friend, Donald Trump.
Epstein’s recruitment into the intelligence world, ironically, may have come when he was a math teacher at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan whose headmaster, Donald Barr, was William Barr’s father.
Donald Barr worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s precursor, and wrote a novel about child-sex slavery. William Barr worked for the CIA’s China desk and for years as a CIA lawyer.[7]
Barr’s role in helping to cover up Epstein’s murder brings things full circle and suggests CIA involvement—which makes sense in light of what is known about Epstein’s life.
An HBO documentary series that featured Baden estimated that, to that moment, he had performed more than 20,000 autopsies in his 45-year career. High-profile cases in which he was involved included that of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nicole Brown Simpson. One of Epstein’s cell mates during his time in MCC, Michael Franzese, a former Colombo crime family capo, said that the architecture and layout of Epstein’s cell would not allow somebody to kill themselves. “There’s just no way you are able to commit suicide, no way. There’s no way to hang yourself, there’s nothing from the ceiling, there’s nothing from the bed. You’d have to be a midget and work really hard to hang yourself and I don’t think you could accomplish it,” he noted, adding that there were no fixtures on the ceiling, with the beds being low to the floor. ↑
A government source familiar with the investigation told CBS News that Attorney General Pam Bondi was incorrect in her statement that the security system had a nightly reset resulting in a lost minute every night. ↑
- See David Martin, The Murder of Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair (Chantilly, VA: DCD Publishers, 2020); Jeremy Kuzmarov, “With the Clinton Brand Now Discredited, Its High Time to Reopen the Investigation into the Death of Vince Foster,” CovertAction Magazine, January 5, 2022.
- See David Martin, The Assassination of James Forrestal (Hyattsville, MD: McCabe Publishing, 2019); Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Was the 1949 ‘Suicide’ of Defense Secretary James Forrestal the First Major Domestic Political Assassination of the Emerging U.S. Deep State After WWII?” CovertAction Magazine, October 27, 2021.
This would have been consistent with the CIA’s assassination manual—written in the early 1950s—which stated that “the most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.” ↑
Public opinion polls show that only 16% of Americans believe that Epstein died by suicide. 45% believe he was murdered and the rest are unsure. Another suspicious death that appears to be connected with Epstein’s was that of Jean-Luc Brunel, head of a French modeling agency associated with the Epstein trafficking network, who was found hung in his jail cell in Paris in February 2022 while he was awaiting trial on charges of raping minors. According to one report, 22 people in Epstein’s inner-circle have died suspiciously. This is somewhat reminiscent of the assassination of John F. Kennedy where many other people associated with the case turned up dead. One of the suspicious deaths in the Epstein case is that of his final cellmate, Efrain “Stone” Reyes, 51, who was transferred out of his cell just one day before his death. ↑
- See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “While Guilty for Sex Trafficking, Ghislaine Maxwell Takes Fall for Alleged Sexual Blackmail Operation Run by Western Intelligence Agencies,” CovertAction Magazine, July 14, 2022. This article provides a summary of certain publicly disclosed facts about Epstein’s intelligence ties and reference to sources that researchers can draw upon. Evidence of William Barr’s CIA background and support for the Clinton machine in Arkansas through a deal by which Bill Clinton agreed to carry out covert operations with the Nicaraguan Contras in exchange for the CIA helping to advance his political career, can be found in Terry Reed and John Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1994).
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
