This is an opinion piece. Gabby Jedziniak is a senior at Mendham who writes for global and school news. All of the views expressed in the following editorial are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Patriot.

The Jeffrey Epstein story seems to be the story that never ends. He has constantly been in the news for decades with multiple accusations, convictions, and more. Even after his death, he leaves the question of what really happened to him. How he really died. To this day, over a year after his death, the story still continues, but with a case against Ghislaine Maxwell in the spotlight now. 

First off, who is Jeffrey Epstein? Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier and sex offender. He assaulted, raped, and trafficked dozens of underaged women over the course of who knows how many years. The first known reporting of Jeffrey Epstein was back in 1996, according to the victim who reported him, as she tells us in the documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. After more and more reports make their way to the police and a couple of attempted arrests and charges, Epstein is charged with a single felony account of solicitation of prostitution in Florida, 2006. Chief of Police, Michael Reiter, was not happy with this outcome. He decided to bring the Epstein case to the FBI, saying that these charges were far from enough considering it didn’t even touch the fact that the girls were minors, and that this was a far worse situation then how they were taking it, as he tells us in the documentary. 

The FBI investigation had only been going on for two years, most of what they did and discussed kept secret, up until June 2008 when he pleaded guilty to state charges: one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of solicitation of prostitution with a minor. With the plea deal, he was sentenced to 18 months in jail and a year of community control or house arrest. Although Epstein served 13 of his 18 months, 6 of the 7 days a week he was out of jail for 12 hours a day to “work.” This deal also stated that by pleading guilty, after this sentence Jeffrey Epstein would be given immunity from any other state charges and all federal charges, along with his named and unnamed co-conspirators as stated in the original plea deal and again in this civil suit from April 2020. 

Jeffrey Epstein’s victims were unaware of this deal until after it happened and were not happy. Some of the victims decided to join together and file a lawsuit, saying that the Crime and Victims Rights Act was violated and that they should’ve had their day in court to speak against him before this deal was made. Finally, in July 2019, almost eleven years later, Epstein is arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. 

He was only in jail for about a month until he was found dead in his jail cell on August 10th. Many ask, did he kill himself? The answer? Nope. Although his death was ruled a suicide, it was originally labeled inconclusive, as explained in this 60 Minutes interview, until days later when it was changed. Despite the ruling of suicide, many people believe Epstein was murdered. In all honesty, there are just too many “coincidences” and “mishaps” that night, that there is no way it wasn’t staged.   

First off, there is no way that everything that happened the night/early morning of Epstein’s death was all a coincidence. The first red flag in the jail is that according to the documentary, the security cameras that were by Epstein’s cell were out that night. And that there was an estimated window of 6 hours when the guards didn’t pass or check on Epstein. If the guards knew the security camera was out, wouldn’t they try to fix it? Or if not, wouldn’t they check on that floor more often, knowing there was no surveillance? The second flag is that the crime scene was tampered with. The guard claims that they had cut Epstein down, and ordered he be taken to a hospital. And because there was no surveillance anywhere, we have no way of knowing how the body was found. No matter if it is a suicide or murder, it is a crime scene and therefore should not be tampered with. It would be a different story if he was found still alive, but the autopsy estimates that he had been dead for roughly two hours before he was discovered. 

Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, also didn’t believe the death was a suicide. So much so that he hired pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, to do another autopsy on the body. Through this autopsy, Baden found multiple clues that pointed more towards a homicide than suicide. The first thing he noticed was petechial hemorrhages in Epstein’s neck, as we are told in the 60 Minutes interview and article on the interview. Petechial hemorrhages are burst vessels that are a key indicator of compression around the neck and are seen much more in compression than they are in hangings. Along with that, there was also an injury to the back of his neck, and an injection mark in his arm, but there is no way to tell if the injection happened at the scene, or in the hospital. Finally, Epstein had three different fractures in three different areas of his neck. There was a fracture of his hyoid bone and both left and right areas of his thyroid cartilages of the larynx. Banes concluded that out of all of the suicides he has seen and the thousand documented ones he compared Epstein’s to, he had never seen these injuries in another hanging and that it would be a very, very, very unlikely scenario. 

It just makes sense. Jeffrey Epstein was a very powerful person who was connected to or friends with other powerful people like Trump, the Clintons, and dozens more. Because of this and the cameras all over all of his estates according to witnesses and victims as explained in the documentary, he was assumed to have some kind of dirt on so many powerful people, that basically anyone could have wanted him dead. Especially with his hearing coming up when he could’ve possibly been looking for some sort of deal for a lesser sentence. He had already been through so much and put so many other people through so much, after him acting so tough and so carefree throughout his life, and after doing all this research on him, he just doesn’t seem like the kind of person to just give up. ESPECIALLY before his final hearing. Chief of Police Michael Reiter even described Epstein saying, “I don’t believe Jeffrey Epstein ever regretted a single thing in his life.” I’m not trying to say that he seemed fine on the outside so I don’t think he killed himself. My big push is that if his own brother really doesn’t believe it was a suicide, to the point of hiring a pathologist for an autopsy, I don’t think it was a suicide, and that there is plenty of evidence to support that. 

There is no way, that Jeffrey Epstein actually committed suicide.