Fake Epstein suicide video slips into DOJ release
A fake video purporting to show Jeffrey Epstein attempting suicide in his prison cell has made it into the latest batch of records on the convicted sex offender released by the US Department of Justice.
Last week, the DOJ uploaded thousands of documents online under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, legislation signed by US President Donald Trump in November, compelling the agency to publish data tied to federal criminal investigations into the disgraced financier and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Among the recordings, there was a 12-second clip showing a gray-haired male in an orange prison jumpsuit sitting on the floor of a prison cell and apparently trying to choke himself.
The time-stamp in the video claimed that it was made at 4:29am on August 10, 2019. At 6:30am that same day, a prison guard found Epstein dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
The clip was widely shared on social media on Monday, but turned out to be a fake which had been circulating online for at least five years.
Various media outlets traced it to footage uploaded to YouTube in October 2020. In the caption, the clip’s creator acknowledged that it was made using 3D graphics and said he was “not that great with this stuff.”
The documents published by the DOJ also included an email with the link to the clip sent by a man from Florida to federal investigators in March 2021, asking if it was authentic or not.
The US Department of Justice has since deleted the fake video from its website.
The Bureau of Prisons said in its report in 2023 that no video recording from inside Epstein’s cell on the day of his death exists due to a technical malfunction.
The convicted sex offender apparently hanged himself with his bedsheets, but skeptics continue to insist that he was murdered to cover up for the powerful individuals supposedly implicated in the case.
