For months, whatever Donald Trump tried to do as President, someone would suggest it was just an attempt to “distract” the public from the Epstein files.
Kidnapping the Venezuelan president in a night-time raid? A distraction. Sending ICE en masse into Minneapolis? You guessed it. Some people even suggested Trump’s assault on Iran – by far the largest military operation of either of his presidencies – might just be a bid to move the narrative away from Trump’s ongoing entanglement with the world’s most notorious sex trafficker.
On Wednesday, the world received final confirmation – as if any more were needed – that Donald Trump will never be free of the Epstein story. Almost seven years after Jeffrey Epstein’s death, a federal court released to the public what is purported to be his suicide note. At a stroke, the Epstein story is once again back in the headlines.
Usually, suicide notes don’t surface so many years after the death of their supposed author. In this case, the long delay related to ongoing legal tussles around the man who found it, Epstein’s cellmate when – a short time before his actual death – Epstein attempted suicide.
Nicholas Tartaglione, that cellmate, said he found the note in a graphic novel shortly after the suicide attempt, and handed it over to his lawyers after Epstein claimed the ligature wounds around his neck were the result of an attempted assault by Tartaglione – possibly in a bid to avoid being placed on suicide watch.
The note itself is sure to enrage victims almost as much as it tantalises conspiracy theorists. Epstein does not come across as a man wracked by guilt for his crimes, nor one fearfully trying to avoid the consequences of naming accomplices. Instead, he simply comes across as an arrogant, powerful man taking what modicum of control he can over his own situation, and denying his victims the power and catharsis of seeing him go through the process of justice.
“They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins. “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye. Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!”
Epstein lived a life of hedonism, making himself incredibly rich through his ability to schmooze and network with billionaires, and using the power and wealth he amassed for his own pleasure at an awful cost to hundreds of young women and girls who he trafficked through his network.
His note – which Tartaglione’s lawyers claimed to have checked as authentic, but which has not been independently verified – appears to show a rich, powerful man seeing that the life remaining to him will not be “fun” in the way it has been to date, and deciding to exit on his own terms.
For Epstein’s victims, its publication will serve as a bitter reminder that the justice they campaigned for over the course of years and decades was denied to them. When Epstein was caught in the mid-2000s, he managed to carve out a sweetheart deal that left him detained for just 13 months, with work release. In 2019, he was charged with sex trafficking, and was held in prison until his death by suicide later that year.
It feels absurd now to think that many in Trump’s orbit actively campaigned using Epstein as an issue to help elect Trump, promising that he would release the “files” in full. In practice, the White House had to be forced to do so by Congress, and has faced multiple scandals over delays and improper redactions. The disclosures are believed to have played a role in Trump’s decision to part with Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Trump faces ongoing questions over missing and redacted files.
Trump can probably shrug that off. Most people have already made up their mind about him by now, though his plummeting ratings suggest at least a few people are still capable of changing their view. But the publication of the Epstein note serves as a reminder to Trump that this story can always resurface, probably without warning, and well beyond his ability to control it.
There will always be another document. There will always be another news hook. And there will always be people who want to talk about this story, who want to see accountability, who want whatever answers are still missing.
Leaders through history have often been in need of a memento mori, a reminder that they are just a mortal man. Trump has more than that, he has memento Epstein – a reminder that he will never escape his old associations, however hard he tries.