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Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York

Since the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, there is a body of opinion that will not accept that his death was indeed suicide and that others must have been involved. The thinking goes that Epstein knew a lot about an awful lot of powerful men who were all desperate to make sure he did not make it to trial, or he would reveal all their secrets. Epstein killed himself by hanging in August 2019 at the now closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, having been removed from suicide watch. When the difficulty of any of his former friends getting access to him in jail in order to kill him and make it look like suicide is pointed out, they resort to the ‘LIHOP’ (let it happen on purpose) variety of conspiracy theory, suggesting that he might have been taken off suicide watch so as to enable him to kill himself.

Why are these theories implausible? The simple answer is that even if someone is powerful, it does not give him automatic access to places like prisons, nor does it guarantee that if they ask anyone to do something illegal, such as to collude in a murder, knowingly let it happen or neglect their duty such that someone ends up dead, they will do it. Prisons are full of people, by nature, and anyone going into a cell to hang an inmate would have been noticed, if not by other staff or by the jail’s CCTV system, then by other inmates, and with it being an administrative or pre-trial detention facility, some of those inmates were not going to be there very long and some would have been found not guilty and released, whereupon they could have freely shared what they had seen, but no such thing has happened more than four years later. Prison staff are not all sadists or crooks; some of them would have been interested in the Epstein case and might have been excited to see the details come out at trial. To get the staff to turn a blind eye to his murder or allow him to kill himself would have required an order, and an order to do something illegal is an order that staff would have been under no obligation to obey. Besides, if you want someone dead, allowing them to kill themselves is not a reliable way of doing that.

Conspiracy theories are often long on perceived motives and short on actual empirical evidence that a crime or a cover-up actually took place. In this case, they ignore the fact that Epstein had ample motive to kill himself and that many others have done so in the same circumstances. He was a wealthy and formerly powerful man who had large estates and private islands as well as access to other powerful men and to young girls to sate his sexual appetites; now he was a powerless nobody, a number in a prison surrounded by gangsters, terrorists, other types of criminals, poor people and guards who were not in awe of his wealth and power and did not consider him special. American prisons have a reputation as places where rape is common, and no doubt Epstein had no desire to see the tables turned on himself, however true this was at MCC.

His death echoes previous suicides of people facing or actually serving life sentences after having previously enjoyed power over others. For example, Ariel Castro killed himself in prison in Illinois at the start of a life sentence for kidnapping three young women, holding them captive in his house for many years in chains, raping them repeatedly, fathering children some of whom he killed. There have been dictators who killed themselves after they were overthrown  or their imperial adventures faced defeat: Adolf Hitler and some of his cabinet in 1945 are classic examples. Had they remained alive, they would have been imprisoned and very likely executed (and very brutally if they fell into the hands of the Russians who controlled Berlin). As for why Epstein was taken off suicide watch, the likely reason is that he did not appear suicidal; being as he was a very wealthy inmate, staff may have believed he was confident his lawyers would get him off. He had done time (albeit under much less stringent conditions) in a county jail before.

The claims that he must have been murdered are simply not backed up with evidence. It’s all suspected motives and no proof. Epstein had just come crashing down from a life of luxury and power to a life of squalor and misery, realised he was likely to be in that situation for a long time if not the rest of his life, and killed himself. It isn’t the first time someone has done this in a similar situation, and it is unlikely to be the last.

Image source: Jim Henderson, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the CC0 public domain licence.

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