Man once held in same cell as Epstein: ‘Just no way’ it was suicide
A man once held in the same jail cell as Jeffrey Epstein argued that there is “just no way” the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender died by suicide in 2019.
“I spent seven months on that tier and in those cells. And the first thing I have to say, there’s just you – there’s no way you are able to commit suicide. There’s just no way, there’s no way to hang yourself. There’s nothing from the ceiling, there’s nothing from the bed. You’d have to be a midget and work really hard to try to hang yourself, and I don’t think you can accomplish it at that point,” former mob boss Michael Franzese told guest host Brian Entin during his Monday night appearance on NewsNation’s “Banfield.”
The Justice Department (DOJ), alongside the FBI, released an unsigned memo earlier this month, writing that Epstein, who was in prison awaiting sex trafficking charges, killed himself in 2019 and that he did not keep the so-called “client list.”
“After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019. This conclusion is consistent with previous findings,” the FBI and DOJ wrote in the 1-page memo. The DOJ also released a nearly 11-hour video recording of outside Epstein’s prison cell during the final hours of his life.
“As DOJ’s Inspector General explained in 2023, anyone entering or attempting to enter the tier where Epstein’s cell was located from the SHU common area would have been captured by this footage. The FBI’s independent review of this footage confirmed that from the time Epstein was locked in his cell at around 10:40 pm on August 9, 2019, until around 6:30 am the next morning, nobody entered any of the tiers in the SHU,” the DOJ memo read, referring to a special housing unit.
The FBI’s “raw” Epstein prison video was likely modified and may have been stitched together from two or more source clips, Wired reported on Friday, after analyzing, along with independent video forensics experts, the metadata embedded in the video.
“You know, as far as the cameras being off, I haven’t experienced that. I did eight years in prison, and I haven’t experienced cameras being broken in the perfect storm of correctional officers not walking those cells,” Franzese told Entin. “They walk in and they look in on you all the time.”
New York City’s Medical Examiner in 2019 ruled that Epstein died by suicide.
The DOJ memo has ignited furor among the MAGA base. The anger has been directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has pledged more transparency about the case earlier this year, including saying that she had the so-called “client list” on her desk, comments she clarified earlier this month.
President Trump has backed up Bondi, saying on Saturday that she is doing a “FANTASTIC JOB” as attorney general and that supporters should move on to other topics.
Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, said on Monday that the two judges in New York are suppressing information, not the Trump administration.
“I don’t know of any information that they could disclose that they haven’t disclosed. Now maybe there is some, but I’m simply not aware of it. And so, I think it’s important to place the blame where the blame deserves to be placed,” Dershowitz said on NewsNation’s “Cuomo.”
Dershowitz shut down theories that Epstein was murdered, but indicated that the sex offender could not have taken his life entirely on his own.
“It was not a suicide that he could have committed alone. I think the jailers had something to do with his cellmate being dismissed, with the cameras being turned off,” the lawyer said. “So there are things that can be hidden, but there’s no smoking gun here, and there’s no fault on the part of this administration, as far as I can tell.”