According to a new report issued on Tuesday by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, staff at the prison where Jeffrey Epstein was housed while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges engaged in “significant misconduct,” including potentially illegal behavior, which led to the conditions that allowed him to commit suicide in 2019.
According to the investigation, prison staff at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York made a number of errors, including failing to assign Epstein a new cellmate after he was put on suicide watch, failing to adequately monitor the Special Housing Unit where Epstein was being held before his death, and failing to check that the facility’s security camera system could record video.
The study also revealed that Epstein was given extraordinary privileges not available to other inmates, such as the chance to make an unmonitored, unrecorded phone conversation on August 9, the evening before he passed away.
According to the investigation, prison personnel gave Epstein permission to use an unrecorded phone line after he spoke with his attorneys that evening.
Inmates regularly utilize this line to contact their legal counsel. Epstein used the phone to contact a number with a local 646 area code after telling a jail guard that he wanted to talk to his mother, who passed away in 2004.
The inspector general was informed by a jail employee that a guy answered the phone and gave Epstein the receiver.
The caller, who is characterized as a female in the report but isn’t given a name, denied the inspector general’s request for an interview, but her attorney informed the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office that she was in the nation of Belarus at the time.
Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, two correctional officers who were on duty in the Special Housing Unit the night that Epstein perished, were previously charged with falsifying prison records.
Later, once they completed deferred prosecution agreements, the charges were dropped.
The audit made public on Tuesday discovered four additional employees who may have committed criminal offenses by fabricating records, acting “unhonestly,” or making false claims.
Epstein’s death has been the subject of conspiracy theories since 2019, however the FBI and the New York City medical examiner earlier concluded that Epstein committed suicide. These conclusions were supported by the inspector general’s report.
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