More than three months after Jeffrey Epstein reportedly hanged himself in a New York City jail, two of his guards will be charged with failing to properly monitor the notorious financier and sex offender before his suicide.
The Bureau of Prisons workers — one of whom was not a full correctional officer — are expected to be arrested and appear in federal court on Tuesday morning; the exact charges they face are unclear. It had previously been reported that in the run-up to Epstein’s death at the understaffed Metropolitan Correction Center in lower Manhattan, the pair had fallen asleep during their shifts, then falsified records to cover up their lapses.
Immediately after news of Epstein’s death broke in August, conspiracy theories about the circumstance of his death bloomed — no surprise given the powerful people with whom Epstein mixed and the seemingly inexplicable incompetence on display at the jail. No hard evidence has emerged since then that Epstein’s death was anything other than a suicide, though a prominent forensic psychologist with a spotty record, who was hired by Epstein’s brother, recently created a stir by declaring that his death “points to homicide rather than suicide.”
Nevertheless, the idea that Epstein’s suicide was not actually a suicide still enjoys widespread currency. And in recent weeks, the phrase “Epstein didn’t kill himself” has become a semi-ironic mainstream meme, appearing everywhere from Jesse Watters’s Fox News show to college football pregame shows.
