Billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein was found semi-conscious in a fetal position in his jail cell, according to sources who spoke to the local NBC affiliate in New York.
Epstein, 66, who was being held in the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in New York City to await trial for alleged conspiracy and sex trafficking, bore marks on his neck, leading two sources to speculate that he may have tried to hang himself. Another source claimed that Epstein’s injuries were not serious, and were perhaps a means to secure a transfer.
Investigators are not ruling out assault and have reportedly questioned another inmate named Nicholas Tartaglione, 49, who is accused of killing four men and burying them. Tartaglione denies having anything to do with Epstein’s injuries, according to NBC.
Epstein is now reportedly on suicide watch in the facility.
Epstein was arrested and charged earlier this month for allegedly sex trafficking minors and conspiracy in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. His arrest came shortly after a New York federal appeals court unsealed more than 2,000 pages of judicial documents related to Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell, both of whom are suspected of participating in an international sex trafficking operation.
Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York alleged that Epstein “enticed and recruited, and caused to be enticed and recruited, minor girls … to engage in sex acts with him,” after which he would “give the victims hundreds of dollars in cash,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to two state-level prostitution solicitation charges, having reached a plea deal agreement with his attorneys, former independent counsel Ken Starr and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, and prosecutors, which included then-U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida Alexander Acosta. Acosta resigned from the Trump administration earlier this month amid media scrutiny about the agreement, which some have argued was too lenient.
The news comes on the same evening as a Daily Beast report that the convicted sex offender visited the Clinton White House in the 1990s, contradicting a July 8 statement from the former president’s spokesman.
