The Justice Department investigated Jeffrey Epstein's death. Then it went silent.

• Jeffrey Epstein's death in a federal jail was seen as a shocking Justice Department failure.
• Over three years later, the DOJ inspector general hasn't released the results of its investigation.
• Epstein's accusers — and his brother — still want answers.

On October 28, 2019, two months after his brother's death, Mark Epstein was summoned to the US Attorney's office in downtown Manhattan.

Jeffrey Epstein died in the custody of a federal jail just one building over, and officials at the Justice Department said they had an update for Mark on their investigation into his death. 

Mark showed up with a lawyer and Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist he hired to examine Jeffrey's body. Baden believed Jeffrey Epstein died by homicide.  

The group was met with a "nice little panel" of Justice Department officials, Mark Epstein recalled.

The officials said Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide. Pressed for more detail, they just repeated themselves.

"They didn't give me any information other than 'After a thorough investigation, we determined it was a suicide,'" Mark Epstein said. "It was like I was talking to a fucking robot."

The meeting was the only time Mark got any answers from the DOJ about his brother's death. Three years later, he still doesn't know exactly how Epstein died and why it's taken the government that long to share its answer to that question.

Mark Epstein told Insider that even though he's Jeffrey's next of kin, he hasn't been able to obtain certain medical records, including the care reports filled out by EMTs who evaluated his brother's corpse.

The public hasn't gotten answers either. Epstein flew at the heights of power, consorting with presidents and princes while at the same time abusing scores of girls. His death in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons represents one of the most shocking failures of federal law enforcement in history. How could the Justice Department let him just slip away?

The Justice Department's Office of Inspector General launched an investigation after he was found dead. But more than three years later, the office still hasn't released its report into the circumstances of Epstein's death.

In the information vacuum, conspiracy theories have proliferated about whether Epstein was killed to cover up for his powerful friends — Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew among them.

Epstein's victims and at least one US senator are still demanding answers from the DOJ.  

"For many people, the death was suspicious, to say the least," said Gloria Allred, an attorney who represents 20 of Epstein's victims. "Others have their own conclusions about what happened to Mr. Epstein. But the speculation needs to be replaced by facts and evidence."

Mark Epstein remains puzzled by the holdup. He's convinced his brother didn't kill himself and stands by the conclusions of Baden, who personally observed the four-hour autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein's body.

"We all took it by surprise," Mark Epstein told Insider. "Nobody thought he was gonna kill himself. Nobody."

After 3 years, it's not clear what's holding up DOJ's report

When Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell, on August 10, 2019, then-Attorney General Bill Barr's first reaction was disbelief, he later wrote in his memoir.

"No one's gonna believe it was a suicide," Barr recalled saying. "There'll be conspiracy theories all over the place."

Epstein had been arrested two months earlier on charges that he trafficked girls for sex. He was investigated by Manhattan federal prosecutors following a series of articles by the Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown, who detailed how he secured a secret, lenient plea deal with Florida prosecutors in 2007, even after law enforcement concluded he sexually abused more than 30 girls. A compensation program his estate formed after his death concluded he sexually abused at least 136 people overall.

Until his arrest in 2019, Epstein continued living a lavish lifestyle, splitting time between his Palm Beach home, his Manhattan mansion, an island in the US Virgin Islands, and an apartment in Paris.

After losing all that, it was possible he found the prospect of life behind bars unappealing, Mark Epstein said. 

"When I first heard that my brother was dead, and found dead from suicide, I just figured, 'OK, he decided to take himself out,'" he told Insider.

Barr tasked the Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and the FBI with investigating "the circumstances of Mr. Epstein's death."

There were two major unanswered questions: How, exactly, did he die? And — whether it was a suicide or homicide — how did the Bureau of Prisons allow it to happen?

Within those questions are a number of smaller mysteries, still unresolved. Why was Epstein's body moved after his death, in violation of jail protocol? If his body was found hours after he already died, why did paramedics try to push air into his lungs? If he hanged himself, why does Baden believe the bone fractures in his neck were more consistent with strangling? Why would he tear strips of bedsheets to make a noose instead of using the cord of his sleep-apnea machine? Why weren't the cameras watching his cellblock working the day he died? Who else was incarcerated in the same block, and did they see anything?

Epstein claimed he had dirt on powerful people and, after his 2007 guilty plea, still appeared to consort with the likes of Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Elon Musk, and Steve Bannon. Were any of Epstein's acquaintances capable of planning an assassination? 

An Insider poll taken later that fall found nearly half of Americans believed Epstein was murdered.

The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General is uniquely suited to answer these questions. Equipped with subpoena power and statutory independence, the office is one of the rare institutions in Washington, DC, carefully designed to stand apart from partisan forces and political winds.

It also had a significant measure of independence from Barr, whose own father may have given Epstein a job that he leveraged into a career in finance.

More than three years later, it's not clear why the inspector general's investigation is taking so long.

Horowitz's other high-profile investigations concluded far more quickly. An investigation into the flow of US arms to Mexican drug cartels took a year. A 568-page report about how the Justice Department dealt with Hillary Clinton's email server and a 478-page report about the "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation into Trump's links with Russia were each released about a year and a half after they were initiated.

Glenn Fine, who served as the Justice Department's inspector general between 2000 and 2011, told Insider the office is likely taking extraordinary care to make sure it gets all the details right.

"The OIG is probably taking the position: We want to make sure we get it right, and we want to make sure we are thorough and that the report is so convincing that the people who think that Epstein was murdered will be persuaded by all the evidence once it's out there," Fine said.

There are four possible reasons the report hasn't yet been released, Fine said. The inspector general's office could still be investigating; it's holding a report so as not to interfere with any pending criminal cases; it's writing the report; or it's waiting for feedback from the Bureau of Prisons. 

A representative for the Bureau of Prisons said it was cooperating with the Justice Department and referred Insider to the Office of Inspector General for further questions. A spokesperson for the inspector general's office declined to comment on this story.

The only public criminal cases linked to the inspector general's investigation were charges brought against Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, the two jail security guards who were tasked with watching Epstein and other inmates housed near him. That case stemmed from investigations by the FBI and the US attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, which is parallel to but independent from the inspector general investigation, run out of Washington, DC.

In a November 2019 indictment, Manhattan prosecutors said Noel and Thomas skipped their required rounds the night of Epstein's death but falsified records to hide that fact.

Prosecutors used court documents in the case to give the public a glimpse of what they had discovered. Video footage indicated no one entered the area outside Epstein's cellblock between 7:49 p.m. on August 9, when he was escorted to his cell, until 6:33 a.m. on August 10, when Noel and Thomas were serving breakfast and found him dead.

"Epstein was alone in his cell and not responsive, with a noose around his neck," the indictment said.

Noel and Thomas entered deferred prosecution agreements in May 2021, agreeing to be interviewed by the OIG's investigators. They sat for those interviews in June that year, according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke to Insider on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

Prosecutors formally dropped the criminal charges against Noel and Thomas in December 2021. Once that case was over, it looked like the path was clear for the inspector general's office to release the report.

But it's been more than a year, and the report is still under wraps.

Even members of Congress appear to have lost interest in Epstein's fate.

Back in December 2019, four members of the Senate Judiciary Committee — Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee — wrote an open letter urging Horowitz to complete his investigation.

"These events have ignited a crisis of public trust in the Department and exacerbated the erosion of trust that the American people have in our institutions of republican self-government more broadly," they wrote.

Representatives for Cruz and Blackburn didn't respond to Insider's request for comment on this story. Sasse, who sent a follow-up letter to Horowitz in 2020 and who's now the president of the University of Florida, didn't respond to Insider's request for comment, either.

Only Blumenthal responded to Insider's request for comment. He urged Horowitz to release his report soon.

"I continue to believe the public deserves to be made aware of the results of the Department of Justice's investigation into the death of Jeffrey Epstein," Blumenthal said.

Fine believes Horowitz is in a tough spot with the investigation, likely weighing the importance of informing the public against doing a thorough job.

"I believe that it's important to be timely, particularly in matters of significant public concern," Fine, now a Governance Studies fellow at The Brookings Institution and law professor at Georgetown University, told Insider. "Having said that, it's most important to get it right, and to be thorough and persuasive."

Epstein's death highlighted bigger problems in federal jails 

It remains unclear how much of the inspector general's investigation has encompassed failures at the jail where Epstein was housed.

After Noel and Thomas were charged with falsifying records, their lawyers argued they were scapegoats for the Bureau of Prisons as a whole, which left the Metropolitan Correctional Center chronically understaffed, forced employees to work extraordinarily long hours, and allowed the facility to deteriorate. Only 18 employees were guarding the MCC's roughly 750 inmates the night Epstein died, records show.

Records obtained by The New York Times demonstrate that jail staffers bungled routine details. An intake form described Epstein as a Black male and indicated he had no prior sex-offense convictions. Numerous phone calls he made while in custody weren't logged.

Martin Weinberg, one of Epstein's criminal defense attorneys in his New York case, told Insider that he hopes the inspector general's investigation will shed more light on the dire conditions of the MCC.

"His conditions of confinement were medieval," Weinberg said. 

The inspector general's office has made passing mentions of Epstein a handful of times in broader reports about the Justice Department. In 2019, it mentioned the deaths of Epstein and Whitey Bulger as examples of why the Bureau of Prisons needed better monitoring for incarcerated people. A 2020 report said the indictment against the two jail guards, Noel and Thomas, promoted "accountability."

In a 2022 report about the Justice Department's challenges, the inspector general's office called Epstein's death a suicide and said it had "numerous ongoing investigations" into whether Bureau of Prisons employees did their job well and how deaths like Epstein's "impair the public's trust in the Department."

The Bureau of Prisons shut down the MCC entirely in August 2021 and transferred its inmates to other facilities. It remains closed.

Despite the Justice Department's policy of not commenting on ongoing investigations, Barr has happily gabbed about how the MCC was to blame for Epstein's death.

Just two days after Epstein's death, Barr suggested in a speech to police-union members that the investigation would focus on "serious irregularities" at the jail.

In an interview with the Associated Press in November 2019, Barr said he concluded Epstein killed himself and that "a perfect storm of screwups" at the MCC allowed it to happen. In his memoir, the former attorney general wrote that correctional staff failed to do their job of checking on Epstein every 30 minutes, and that he was not housed in the same cell as "a trusted inmate," as he was supposed to be, as a result of "an unintentional oversight."

Mark Epstein doesn't believe his brother killed himself

When Mark Epstein saw Barr dismiss the possibility of a murder based on his review of security footage outside Jeffrey Epstein's cell tier, he wasn't remotely satisfied. 

"What I thought was, this is either a cover-up, or he's the dumbest fuck on the planet," Mark Epstein said.

To Mark, Barr's version of events suggests he came to the conclusion that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself and then backfilled evidence from there. 

Barr seemed to consider only the possibility that a murderer would have been someone who snuck into the jail. Mark told Insider he was gobsmacked that Barr didn't seem to consider the possibility that someone else in Jeffrey Epstein's block of cells killed him.

Since there were eight cells in the tier, there would have been between seven and 14 people other than Epstein in the block, depending on how many had cellmates. The Justice Department has not made the names of those incarcerated people public.

Mark Epstein told Insider that he spoke to his brother about once a month in the years before his death. The two caught up over the phone while Jeffrey Epstein was in Paris, the night before he flew to New Jersey and was arrested after his private jet landed.

Jeffrey Epstein had reasons to stay alive, Mark said. He didn't leave a suicide note — or at least none that has been reported — and reportedly deposited money into other inmates' commissary accounts in return for protection. People who spoke with him in the weeks leading up to his death believed he was optimistic about getting the charges dismissed.

After he was arrested, in early August 2019, Epstein and attorney David Schoen had a five-hour meeting to discuss criminal-defense strategies. Schoen told Insider that Epstein appeared optimistic that he'd be protected by the controversial and unusual non-prosecution agreement he signed with Alexander Acosta, the US Attorney in Florida he cut a deal with in 2007. Bill Cosby had his sexual-assault conviction overturned in 2021 for similar reasons, Mark Epstein pointed out. Epstein's Florida agreement had been repeatedly upheld by federal courts.

Mark Epstein told Insider he built his wealth independently from his brother, founding a silk-screening business before pivoting to real estate with Ossa Properties, which at one point reportedly owned hundreds of apartments in New York City.

At least one of Mark Epstein's Upper East Side buildings, however, includes multiple links to his brother. Mark has said he purchased it from the business magnate Leslie Wexner, his brother's longtime patron. Jeffrey Epstein owned about a dozen apartments in the building, which he used to house at least one of his sex-trafficking victims as well as his private pilots while they were staying in New York, according to testimony at Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. Right before Epstein died, his lawyers were preparing to appeal a judge's decision to deny him bail. They had prepared a bond package valued at $100 million.

Mark Epstein agreed to guarantee the whole thing, he told Insider, meaning he'd lose that amount of money if his brother tried to flee authorities.

"If you get bail, you're gonna be home for a year — under house arrest, with an ankle bracelet, armed guards, video cameras, whatever the conditions were — but he'll be in his house," Mark Epstein said. "So why kill yourself then?"

There are still unanswered questions about Epstein's body

It's not clear to what extent the inspector general's office has tried to retrace Jeffrey Epstein's last days.

Michael Baden — the forensic pathologist, who sits on a commission that reviews all inmate deaths in New York state-controlled prisons and jails — told Insider that investigators haven't interviewed him.

Mark Epstein, Weinberg, and Schoen (who said he has full confidence in Horowitz) all spoke to Jeffrey Epstein not long before his death and said they haven't been interviewed by the inspector general's office either.

A person close to Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, said the inspector general's office never requested an interview with her about the investigation into Epstein's death.

Baden still has lingering questions about the state of Epstein's body.

Kristin Roman, the New York City medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, couldn't come to a conclusion and listed the manner of death as "pending further study." Baden claims Roman told him at the time that she wanted to learn more about the circumstances of Epstein's death before making a final determination.

"It wasn't clear yet what the findings were at the scene, because he was brought out of the cell many hours after he died, when nobody had seen him," Baden said. "We didn't know at the time, and we still don't know, how the two guards found him — whether he was hanging, whether he had a ligature around his neck — because nobody else saw the scene."

New York City's chief medical examiner at the time, Barbara Sampson, sidestepped Roman and ruled the death a suicide a few days later, after saying she reviewed additional evidence. She didn't disclose what that additional evidence was, but CBS News reported that one element was Epstein's prior suicide attempt. Roman didn't respond to Insider's request for comment.

According to Baden, certain features of Epstein's dead body lined up more with homicide than suicide. His neck bones were fractured in three different places in a way you'd expect from strangling, he said. There weren't hemorrhages in his eyes, as you'd expect with a suicide, according to Baden. And the ligature marks on Epstein's neck didn't look like they'd come from the bedsheet found in his cell, Baden said.

"The ligatures on the ground do not match the mark on the neck," Baden said. "A smooth sheet leaves a smooth mark on the neck. This one has a pattern. There's a pattern on the skin."

A good forensic pathologist, Baden said, would take into account everything about the circumstances of a subject's death. But the public is still missing key details, such as whether inmates could move freely between their cells within the tier and how the cells were locked. Epstein's body was also moved after he was found dead.

Baden said he still wants to make a final determination about Epstein's death.

"As I sit here, I still don't know what position he was found in," Baden told Insider.

Epstein's accusers want answers from the DOJ

The silence from the DOJ has disappointed Epstein's victims, many of whom believe his death is yet another example of how the federal government failed them in holding the serial child rapist to account.

Attorneys who have collectively represented more than 80 of Epstein's accusers told Insider they were disappointed and puzzled by the lack of transparency.

Lisa Bloom, an attorney who represented eight of Epstein's accusers, told Insider that the silence only leads to distrust among accusers.

"In 2019, he was allowed to take his own life to escape justice — maybe that's what happened," she said. "And now, more than three years later, victims do not even get the simple courtesy of a final report. This breeds resentment and distrust. What is the government hiding?"

"It is remarkable that now, literally years later, the Justice Department has yet to release its report," Paul Cassell, an attorney who sought to invalidate Epstein's non-prosecution agreement, told Insider. "This blatant lack of transparency will only lead to further speculation about exactly how Epstein died."

Some of the attorneys said the secrecy may lead to victims of abuse thinking twice before going to authorities.

"There is no good reason the investigation has taken this long," Brad Edwards, who represented more than 50 of Epstein's accusers, said. "The victims and the public were made strong promises that with pure motive were easy to uphold. The lack of transparency raises suspicions about who is protecting whom or what."

Adam Horowitz, an attorney who represented eight of Epstein's accusers and has no relation to Michael Horowitz, told Insider the lack of information "will deter other suffering crime victims from coming forward."

Mark Epstein wanted to file a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons but said he was blocked by the executors of Jeffrey Epstein's estate. He believes a lawsuit would be a "slam-dunk case" that might have generated answers.

An attorney for the estate executors didn't respond to Insider's request for comment.

Fine told Insider the inspector general's office may be taking a long time because it's being extraordinarily thorough.

"I would think the OIG would be assessing the entire situation," Fine said. "Whether it was just a suicide and, if so, how did it happen? I would expect there to be a full report on this, and maybe that's why it's taking a long time."

Allred said the inspector general's office should, at the very least, give accusers a time frame for the results of the investigation and be told whether it will be made public.

"They were denied their day in court to confront Jeffrey Epstein because of his death," she said. "They should not be denied the results of the investigation by the inspector general."