Did my brother Jeffrey Epstein really kill himself?

0:03The Telegraph.

0:09In the last few days, the full transcripts of Ghislaine Maxwell's interview with Donald Trump's Deputy Attorney General have been published by the Department of Justice. It's an attempt to put to an end weeks worth of damaging stories which have hounded the President's administration. But even with this new information being made public, many questions still remain unanswered about Jeffrey Epstein and the conspiracy theories that surround the case. One of the biggest, of course, being, did Epstein really kill himself in prison? In an exclusive for The Telegraph, we speak to Mark Epstein, his brother, who runs through the evidence that he says suggests Jeffrey perhaps did not kill himself and might have been murdered.

0:51Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominey.

1:04let's be honest Tim even if the Epstein files were released they would not answer a central question that has been troubling people about this ongoing case and that is whether Jeffrey Epstein, really did take his own life in prison. So we have a man, a billionaire financier, with links to President Clinton, President Trump, all being well documented, other high net worth individuals and indeed celebrities. In 2008, he gets sent to prison initially. There's a plea bargain that takes place. His lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who we've interviewed on the Daily Tea, does a deal and he serves time for solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18.

1:57He gets released. We know he then meets up with Prince Andrew and others, probably thinks he can get on with the rest of his life. Then in 2019, the proverbial hits the fan. He's arrested by federal agents and charged in New York with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. Then, on August 10th, 2019, he's found dead in his prison cell. Officials concluded that he took his own life, and that is the official account. But critics have pointed out many discrepancies in the death with relation to whether guards were going to the cell at the time they should be, footage that was missing from CCTV, and details about the autopsy that some people find concerning.

2:48One person who is particularly invested in the case, unsurprisingly, is Mark Epstein, who is the younger brother of Jeffrey Epstein and a property developer. And he has been very outspoken about what he regards as the discrepancies in his brother's death. We have interviewed Mark Epstein. He won't appear on camera. He speaks to us via audio. And this should come with the warning that, of course, we will be dealing with issues regarding suicide and violence. It's also worth pointing out that we did want to ask Mark Epstein about Ghislaine Maxwell, but we were told that that topic was completely off bounds.

3:23Mr. Epstein, we just want to break this down a little bit, because I'd be interested to know what you thought of your brother's state of mind at the time, because that is obviously of significant importance when we're talking about whether he did or did not take his own life? Yeah, it's a very good question. Jeffrey's state of mind was fine. People who spoke to him that the day before he was found dead said he sounded fine. He was looking forward to defending himself in court. Now, also be aware, he had a hearing coming up to appeal the bail decision. He was trying to get bail again, and it increased his bail drastically.

3:59It would have been the highest bail ever in US history. And if he got bail, he'd be out of there. He'd be living in his home. He'd have an ankle monitor on. There'd be armed guards there to make sure he didn't go anywhere. There'd be cameras all over the place. But he wouldn't be in jail. Now, if he was going to kill himself, I would imagine he would wait to see if he got bailed. And that hearing was coming up probably in a matter of days. If he didn't get bail again, it would make a stronger case that he decided to kill himself. But not before that. But Mr. Epstein, if I may just say at this point, it is reported that Jeffrey did allegedly attempt suicide on July the 23rd after being denied bail and had been on suicide watch.

4:40Now, he had been taken off suicide watch when he died, but nonetheless, he had attempted to take his life before. That's not true. It's been shown that he didn't attempt to take his life. His cellmate at the time roughed him up. And Jeff was afraid to report it as such because he was afraid of retaliation. That's why he was taken off a suicide watch so fast, because they realised it really wasn't a suicide attempt. So he did not attempt suicide prior. That's a fallacy. Wow. OK. What are we to make of the conduct of the prison officers that were meant to check on him every 30 minutes, Mr Epstein?

5:17I mean, they were meant to be extremely diligent in making sure that your brother was OK. and then it emerges that they both fell asleep on the job, according to a November 2019 indictment. I mean, the prisons say they had long-suffered staff shortages, but this seems slightly odd, doesn't it, to have people falling asleep on their watch? Well, that in itself, I don't find that surprising. I hear that's not that uncommon in prisons, for the overnight staff to sleep, you know, Because in most of the cases, nothing takes place overnight. The prisoners are locked up and they feel it's safe to screw off.

5:56Now, also the videotape, I didn't watch all 11 hours of it, but the videotape shows that they were moving around. So I don't know how much sleep they actually got. I didn't count the hours. But yeah, that's not that uncommon from what I hear. And usually they're given a slap on the wrist for not doing the rounds. But in this particular case, there were consequences for that. So it became more drastic for them. Jeffrey Epstein was also alone in that cell He had been with another inmate And the inmate had been removed Do we know why? Are you satisfied with explanations for that? No, he was supposed to have a roommate The roommate was taken out And one wasn't replaced Your guess is as good as mine So he was alone Guards were not visiting him And some CCTV footage has gone missing Could you explain the footage that's missing?

6:44Why is it so crucial? Well, because it might show something that we need to see. I don't know why it's missing. I don't know who was in charge of it. I'm not in the prison. But yeah, it's another part of the puzzle of things that went wrong here or intentionally being held back. You know, I've been trying to get the PCR report, which is the pre-hospital care report that's filled out on every call from the fire department EMTs. And I have not been able to get that until now. It's six years later. And think of me, what exactly would that report show? Well, it's a report that the EMTs from the fire department fill out on every call they make.

7:24It's just a routine form. It tells about the history of the call, what they found, what procedures they did. It's just a full report documenting the call to a patient that they make. And I went to the fire department headquarters a couple of years ago to try to get a copy of it. and they could not find it in the fire department computer systems. The clerks in the office themselves couldn't understand why they couldn't find this report. It had been hidden. It was not where it should be in the computer files. There's no reason for that report not to be in their computer files. Every other call they make is in their computer files.

8:04So why was this taken out? Why was this hidden? It's just another one of the cover-up mysteries. It's hard to believe this wasn't a cover-up with all of these elements that point to a cover-up. You know, it's what the lawyers use in court. They say, you know, if you walk outside of your house and the streets are wet and the cars are wet and there's water dripping from the trees, it may not be raining now. But you know it rained. You didn't have to see it raining. There's proof you know it rained. There's so many things here that point to a cover-up with facts being admitted from the reports, documents missing, that it's a cover-up.

8:44It's hard to say it's not. And then you've got to wonder who would have the ability to pull something like this off. Why was Bill Barr, the attorney general, making that ridiculous statement that because nobody went in or out, it was a suicide? I pointed out before, there were other people on the tier that could have hurt somebody on the tier. And two, the recent release of the videotape that Bill Barr was referring to does not prove that nobody went in or out because you do not see the tier door. And it's been shown that you could get to the tier door and leave from the tier door without being caught by that camera.

9:23So the two reasons that he gave for coming up with a suicide determination are bullshit. When the FBI released that surveillance footage, obviously, Mr. Epstein, you watched as much of it as you could bear to watch. There is that suspicious one minute gap that kicks in from 11.58 and 59 seconds p.m. and midnight. So that crucial minute is missing. but what was the time of death attributed to your brother? Are you suggesting that in that crucial minute something could have happened that was obviously omitted on purpose from the tape? Well, I think what's more important about the tape, and obviously the missing minute is important, but the experts who have gone through the tape have shown that the tape itself has been edited a number of times.

10:14It's not the raw footage. It's not just straight footage from the camera with just a minute missing. it's from two different feeds and it's been edited and saved a number of times so this tape has been doctored exactly here what they were hiding i have no idea but it's not pure raw footage it's been doctored it's been edited and saved and there's a gap so again this doesn't look like a nice clear case of a suicide you know it doesn't point to that everything points away from that there there shouldn't be these mysteries. But what's the, I mean, what are you getting at, Mr. Epstein? I mean, spell it out for us, because there's a lot of speculation, let's be honest, online about what may have happened to your brother inside prison.

10:58He could have been killed by an inmate. He could have been killed by darker forces. I mean, what are we saying here? If he didn't take his own life, who could have killed him? Well, yeah, that's the question. Another thing we're trying to find out we can't get is who were the other prisoners on the tier that night? Because what if somebody was put on the tier as a prisoner to kill him? I would like to get a list of who the prisoners were on that tier, when they got there, and where are they now? Because if somebody was planted there to do this, well, you'd see what prisoners were transferred to that ward like the week prior.

11:43And when were they transferred off? Because a lot of, a number of prisoners were transferred off of that ward, off of that tier after the death. We can't track who and where the prisoners are. There's another mystery that should not be a mystery. That information should Because, I mean, prisoners that are in prison for sort of alleged crimes against minors, which was the case in your brother's case. I mean, often they get treated very badly by fellow inmates. But then, so say if it's an inmate to inmate murder, I mean, there could be a case for that. But the conspiracy theorists online are obviously speculating that he may have been killed by darker, higher forces because he knew too much.

12:32I mean, is that something, is that an avenue of inquiry that you are now pursuing? It should be pursued. If it was just an inmate murder kind of thing, you know, because of why he was there, that's understandable. But if you look at the case of this guy, Whitey Bulger, I don't know if you know that case. He was a prisoner, a criminal that was on the lam for like 20 some odd years. And they found him in California and they put him back in jail. And while he was in jail, he was killed. He was brutally killed by three other inmates. And they found out who the inmates were and they were properly prosecuted for Whitey Bulger's murder.

13:09So if Jeff was killed just because another inmate didn't like what he did, why was that not hunted as a homicide? And why wasn't that person found and prosecuted just as Whitey Bulge's murderers were found? Why cover all this up? So that doesn't make sense that it was just an inmate on inmate thing, because that wouldn't require all this cover up. Well, I guess the implication is you have asked why very powerful people have not done X, Y, Z. And if they've not done X, Y, Z when they could and should have done, I guess that's where people impose the darker forces theory, right? Correct. That there are people who might have benefited from his death and have much to lose in the facts about it being revealed.

13:57Absolutely. Like I said, my life would have been easier if the autopsy showed that this was a suicide. But the doctors came out and said they would not call this a suicide. It looked too much like a homicide. And they were not iffy, you know, wishy-washy about that. It was pretty clear. Right. Let's get into the detail of the private autopsy that you paid for then. So as you say, Mr. Epstein, we've got a situation where FBI Director Kash Patel comes straight out and says, you know a suicide when you see it, even though he was neither present at the autopsy nor the prison that night. The decision then you take to carry out a private autopsy, I mean, that is very much in the immediate aftermath of all this.

14:40No, let me correct you. It wasn't a private autopsy. The autopsy was done by the city pathologist. I had nothing to do with that. But I, as a family, I have the right to have my own pathologist witness the autopsy. And if we want to do a second autopsy, we have the right to do that once we claim the body after the official city autopsy. but because Dr. Barton used to be the chief medical examiner of New York, you know, he, whatever he wanted them to do during the initial autopsy, if they did to satisfy his questions. So there was only one autopsy, which was not my, wasn't a private autopsy for me.

15:23It was the city, the official government autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein. I had Dr. Barton there to witness it. So it wasn't a separate autopsy. It was on an autopsy that I paid for. or could influence in any way, shape or form. It was the city pathologist, Dr. Roman, who said she wouldn't call it a suicide because it looked too much like a homicide, and Dr. Barden agreed. But then Barbara Sampson, the chief medical examiner, who was not there, who did not see the body, she calls it a suicide. It doesn't make any sense. It makes no sense. And as you say, Dr. Barden, your guy, then said that to have a broken bone in his neck was, quote, extremely unusual in suicidal hangings and could occur much more commonly in homicidal strangulation.

16:15He had three broken bones in his neck. Yes. There did a study I read out of the Philippines a number of years ago about this very topic, about broken bones from these kind of hangings. And it was something like 20-some-odd percent, maybe it was 28 percent, they found one broken bone. And in a lesser number, there were two broken bones. There was no mention in that report of three broken bones from this kind of a hanging. So, again, that's another red flag here. That was one of the major red flags. And then the other bruises on his body, and even the ligature mark on Jeffrey's neck. You know, there was a groove in his neck from whatever was used around his neck.

16:57The fact that the groove stayed in his neck, you asked about time of death. That showed that he was dead for at least two hours before he was found. Because if you strangle somebody with a cord or something and you just let it go and you let them lie there, the neck will flatten out. The skin will flatten out because the skin muscles are still supple. You have internal cell pressure. You may get an abrasion, a mark on the neck, but a groove won't stay in your neck. The rope has to be on your neck for at least a couple of hours for that groove to stay in your neck when the rope is removed. So Jeffrey had a groove in his neck.

17:34So we know he was dead for at least two hours, but could have been dead a lot longer. We think he was dead for longer because the autopsy showed that he was also relatively clean shaven. now in the prison they shave they bathe and shave on monday wednesday and friday afternoons so assuming he shaved friday afternoon if he was alive until four in the morning because he was found at six something and if he was only dead for two hours it means he died about four something he would have had more of a stubble on his face from a beard because your beard stops growing when you die so the fact that he really didn't have much of a stubble at all means he was probably dead for longer than two hours.

18:15But there's no way to determine it exactly. Also because they moved his body when they found him. He was clearly dead. Like I said, he was dead for at least two hours before he was found. But they took him from the cell to the prison infirmary, which they weren't supposed to do. When you find a dead body, you're supposed to leave it until the medical examiner comes and they can investigate. But by moving his body, the crime scene was disturbed. So they couldn't find out a lot of things that they would normally look to find out. You know, it's another anomaly here. Why was the body moved? When the fire department EMT guys got there from the 911 call, Jeff was already in the prison infirmary.

18:53I only found that out a couple of years ago. I had assumed they went to the cell, but he had already been taken out of the cell. I'd like to find out who was working in the prison, who directed the people there to move the dead body from the cell to the infirmary. Who was running the show there? I was also told there was a handheld video camera. Somebody had a handheld video camera in the prison infirmary and in the hospital where they took his body. And where's the videotape from that camera? Can't find that. Another thing, I have a photograph of him from the medical examiner's office. When he was in the hospital, he's laying on a gurney.

19:32He's dead, but he's wearing a hospital gown, the kind where you put your arms through the front, the ties in the back. So who decided to dress a dead body in a hospital gown? Nobody's ever heard of that, where a dead body is either in a body bag or covered by a sheet. So who decided to dress this dead body in a hospital gown? Were they trying to make it look like he was still alive or salvageable? Just another one of these questions, that why? I mean, I think you're asking some really good questions that do deserve answers. I suppose the alternative narrative, if one was to be devil's advocate, often in the face of claims of cover-up and conspiracy, actually, as we say in Britain, it's cock-up.

20:16You know, the prison's badly run, it's understaffed, people are taking it upon themselves to do stupid things which, in retrospect, are damaging the crime scene, a potential crime scene, damaging the evidence and all the rest of it, but it's just a series of just hapless mistakes. Well, it's either mistakes or intentional wrongdoing. And there's sort of too many mistakes and lies and misinformation for it to just be haphazard. To the rational thinking person, this is some sort of a plan, some sort of a cover-up. The other thing that you feel has been distorted in the telling of all this is the kind of revisionism when it comes to the history of Jeffrey's relationship with Donald Trump.

21:03Yeah, they were extremely close. They were good friends. Jeffrey used to tell me stories about Trump when they used to hang out. It's known I flew up on a plane with Donald and Jeffrey back in 1999 from Florida. I saw them together. They were really good friends for years. And I was surprised when Trump said that he was never in Jeffrey's office because as many people could testify, they saw Donald in Jeffrey's office on numerous occasions. Trump claims that they fell out in Florida in the early 2000s. They never spoke to him again. Do you think that is correct? No, I believe they spoke after that.

21:36Equally, you've also spoken about Steve Bannon's relationship with your late brother. There appears to be 15 hours of video, which Bannon, I think, claims was for a documentary about your brother. Michael Wolfe, the biographer, had claimed that Bannon was a frequent visitor to both your brother's Manhattan townhouse, but also his Paris apartment. What more can you tell us about that, Mr. Epstein? Well, I just know that they were friendly and Bannon, yes, was in the New York house. He was also in the Florida house. But Bannon has about 15 or 16 hours of videotape. He was doing these interviews with Jeffrey.

22:11Bannon told me that himself. So that's not speculation. And Jeffrey had actually sent me a video, a link to see one of the videotapes. and on that videotape Jeffrey states that he stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook that's on the tape really and have you watched all of those tapes no I've asked the only reason I saw that one is Bannon had sent Jeffrey an email with a Dropbox link to that one videotape and Jeffrey folded it to me and I saw it then I didn't realize that the Dropbox video link expires so I can no longer retrieve it. But I watched the videotape and Bannon told me he was, you know, helping Jeffrey.

22:55He was trying to rehabilitate his reputation. But when I met with Bannon, he told me that the tapes were in his vault. I mean, presumably you think that Bannon is keeping those tapes under wraps, even though as his brother, you probably would quite like to see him in the final recordings he ever made. Yes, I've asked Bannon a number of times to let me You see the tapes. I said I would even just sit in a room and watch them. I'm not looking to get copies of them, but to no avail. It is probably worth pointing out here that Steve Bannon has previously denied Michael Wolff's account and reports of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

23:29However, in a 2024 interview on The Jimmy Dore Show, he did say that he was producing a documentary series around the so-called Epstein tapes, adding that, quotes, everything that's been put out about him is not exactly the truth. You have urged a fresh investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's death, which was, of course, ruled a suicide in August 2019. You have said that people should not be allowed to just get away with it. If there were to be a fresh investigation, what would it look like? What should it be looking into and who should lead it? Well, it should be a homicide investigation. That's what it should be, which they didn't do.

24:07And what they should do, I'm not a professional investigator, but I would imagine they would, like I said, They would interview everybody on the premises. They would interview all the inmates on the tier, all the guards that were there. And they would, again, you would look at a normal homicide. Who would benefit from somebody being dead? Who had the ability to have them killed? Who also has the ability to have the Justice Department cover this up? You know, like I said, the Justice Department report that came out a couple of years ago doesn't mention anything about the initial autopsy results.

24:41It states in there that the government notified me of the death. They did not. And the way he was described as being found, we were trying to find out for four years what position Jeffrey was in when they found him. Couldn't find that out. Nobody's talking. But in the Justice Department report, the way they described him, it doesn't really match the ligature mark that was on his neck. If it could be demonstrated that Jeffrey Epstein died in mysterious circumstances or was even killed. What do you think would be the consequences, the fallout of that? I don't know. It depends if they can find out who ordered this hit, so to speak, if it was a hit, or who was responsible.

25:21Like I said, if it was just a prisoner on prisoner death, why wasn't that investigated like Whitey Bulger's death was? There shouldn't be all this mystery and cover-up. If his prior roommate got to him, the guy that roughed him up the first time, if he got to him and killed him, why keep this a secret? Why hide this? Why cover it up? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I ask the question because Jeffrey Epstein now seems to be the big political scandal of our era. It has the potential to seriously damage an incumbent president. By pursuing the facts as you are, I'm sure you're aware of the enormous damage this might do to the American establishment.

26:00Yes. It's already been damaged. Yeah. Finally, Mr. Epstein, how much of a toll has all this taken on you? Well, I'm okay. I mean, initially it was kind of nutty because I was getting, you know, most people didn't know Jeff had a brother. You know, we didn't see each other for seven years before he died, although we were always in touch, you know, through telephone calls and emails. But we never got together. So most people didn't know Jeff had a brother. and when I was asked to participate in this bail and I did then people started saying oh who's this mystery brother and people started looking at me and trying to link me to all kinds of things I started getting death threats I had to get armed guards for a while but I'm okay and then there's a big misconception people think I inherited Jeffrey's his estate I did not but people thought What I did, I started getting calls from all over the world from people who wanted to help me manage the money.

26:59People wanted to help me sell the houses and the jets. People had ideas for what I should invest in or where I should donate money. But I have nothing to do with his estate. That's not my business. Are you going to continue with this? I mean, how can you continue with it? How do you go about it? Well, by bringing more things to light. There's more facts coming up. There are more people investigating this. There are more people like you asking good questions. People are starting to say, hey, wait a minute. it doesn't look like this guy committed suicide. So then you start thinking, well, if he didn't commit suicide, who killed him and why?

27:32And more and more people are realizing that it wasn't a suicide and starting to ask pertinent questions. And I thank you for taking time to listen. Well, we thank you, Mark Epstein, for joining us on The Daily Tea. Thank you very much indeed for your time.

27:56With the Epstein story, I feel there are two ways of interpreting it. One is murder and one is suicide. What is the case for potential murder? The case for potential murder is the string of unanswered questions that Mark Epstein there has just detailed. I do agree with him saying that there are just so many discrepancies to ignore. It's not like, OK, the tape has got a bit missing because somebody took it out of a machine too quickly and it's been damaged and, oh, my God, we've tried our best to restore it. You know, he's talking about doctored tapes, tapes with bits missing, tapes that don't even include the entire vista of the prison cell.

28:41Yes. The inmate happened... His fellow inmate happened to have been taken out of the cell. Yes. The guards happened that evening not to check on Jeffrey Epstein. That evening, one minute of CCTV footage happened to go missing. It's an extraordinary storm, perfect storm, as if Jeffrey Epstein were waiting for the perfect moment, which he couldn't possibly have judged, in which to kill himself and no one would see it. But let's be honest, there is a smoking gun here and it is a smoking gun that has been handled by two, not just one, but two pathologists. We have the state autopsy finding that this man may have been the victim of a homicide and we get Mark Epstein's independent pathologist to watch the autopsy taking place and make the same conclusions and say, so Dr Michael Barden, and say, in the case of Jeffrey Epstein having three breaks to his neck, that that is medically unprecedented in cases of suicide, only for both of those people who actually worked on the body to be usurped by a medical examiner saying, no, actually it was suicide, a head of the FBI saying, no, actually it was suicide, even though he wasn't even there, and a district attorney also saying, oh, no, it must have been suicide, even though they weren't there either.

30:07That's not right, is it? And to cast one's mind back to 2008, which is when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution with a minor. Some people infer a conspiracy in the incredibly uniquely light sentence that he got. That's just Alan Dershowitz who you interviewed being a good lawyer in my mind. Well, he's the world's greatest lawyer. The man was able to leave his prison cell, etc, etc. He had a TV. And the understanding was that what he had been found guilty of would not be relitigated and that everyone around him would not be convicted as well. So there are some people who say that was so light touch.

30:50And then his ending was so bad that the theory is that everyone thought Jeffrey Epstein had effectively got away with it in 2008. And when it resurfaced 10 years later, well, this time he's really going down. Therefore, if he were up to no good and knew other people who were up to no good, maybe that would be the time in which he would finally spill the beans. True. So that's the basis for a potential motive. But I have to say, because you mentioned Alan Dershowitz, there is a case for suicide, which, first of all, is what the officials say it was. He had been thought to have attempted suicide.

31:26He had been on suicide watch. And when I interviewed Dershowitz, he made a very good point, which I think is fair, that in New York, when the state prosecutes you that far, you ain't getting off. No. And you know you're not getting off. Yes. And anyone of Epstein's understanding of the law would have known he was not getting off. So the idea, because a lot of this hinges on conspiracy theorists saying, oh, Epstein believed he was going to walk free. If he did, then he was a fool. Epstein was going down for that. Although we don't know what lawyers at the time, because Dershowitz handled the plea bargain.

32:02He handled the 2008 case. It wasn't his later lawyer. He did not handle 2019. And lawyers might turn around to billionaires and tell them what they want to hear. So, yes, in 2008, we get the plea bargain and Epstein knows he isn't behind bars for long and he's got a lot of money and influence and actually his time in prison isn't that bad at all. And as you say, he returns to Manhattan. The Duke of York in his own idiocy is visiting him and walking around Central Park with him and all the rest of it. 2019, things get extremely serious. He's arrested by federal agents. He's charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking as minors.

32:42So they're only one and one, but at the same time, it threatens to blow open the entire case. And this happened in part because the victim's families had pursued him. Exactly. Because they did not agree, but they obviously did not like the 2008 conviction. And by the way, the other elephant in this room is Ghislaine Maxwell. well, his on-off girlfriend, herself convicted basically for sex trafficking and being his pimp, in inverted commas. What does she know? Where does she think the bodies are buried? What could she reveal? So the whole thing, admittedly, is threatening to blow up. But The Telegraph has spoken to two people in the last few months who both knew Jeffrey Epstein extremely well, in our case just now, his brother, in the case of Henry Samuel, Robert Mendick, the chief reporter, and others, they interviewed his former butler.

33:28a man called Valsen Vieira Cotrin, and he said there is, quote, absolutely no way he killed himself. Now, I also appreciate you've got to be very sensitive when talking about suicide because the number of cases of unfortunately people taking their own lives and their family have turned around and said, we did not see this coming, he wasn't the type to do this. Cotrin says that Epstein said he was going to see him again, that he would get off. So Cotrin says that he believes, Epstein believed he was going to. Don't forget, it's one count of sex trafficking and one count of conspiracy. But it's American justice.

34:05And in American justice, they pursue you because they've got you. It's not quite the same as our country, where it's innocent until proven guilty. In America, you're guilty because we're putting you on trial. The point is, Tim, I mean, goodness me, talking about a story running and running, when I first started out in journalism, I was working on this circa 2000, 2001, on the Rolodex, who he knew, who he didn't know, who went on the Lolita Express, who stayed at Epstein Island and all the rest of it. This mystery continues. It's also perfect cannon fodder for the conspiracy theorists online. They'll never drop this.

34:44Hence the whole conspiracy again around why the Epstein files that Trump had promised to release are now remaining behind closed doors thanks to Pam Bondi. And the Trump administration or Trump, it's not clear whether he is genuinely bored of the story or afraid of the story. Yeah. One can't quite make out. Publicly, the vibe is we should just move on from this because you're not going to find anything else. But it might be that he's very worried about it. We should say that there were certain questions that we were told we could not ask Mark Epstein. And I do think there's an interesting question about, he said he had not spoken to his brother for several years before his brother died.

35:27Seven years, yeah. Seven years. He has picked up this crusade. It's understandable. It's his brother. And it's just a matter of public interest. Why did he commit suicide? But there will be others who will ask, why are you trying to get to the bottom of the death of a very, very horrible man? Yes. Who was found guilty of something, of a terrible crime. Yes. we must not forget, did not do the proper time for it and was probably finally going to do the proper time for it. It would have been better in the interest of justice, of course, if he had actually gone on trial and done the time. Let this not in some way end up be some kind of process of whitewashing Epstein's record as if he was bad but there was something worse going on.

36:10Yes. No. There was nothing worse than his sex trafficking. There was nothing worse than what he did. What we're interested in is who might be connected to it and is there any involvement in Epstein's death? But there is no doubt that the man himself was as guilty as sin. I have a feeling we will be revisiting this again and we'll be back tomorrow at 5pm.