Jeffrey Epstein’s brother is doubling down on his belief that the late financier didn’t die by suicide when he was behind bars, while outlining his suspicions of a potential “cover-up” and demanding more information be released.
“Every American citizen should be concerned. Here you have an American citizen who was killed in prison under federal protection. That should disturb everyone that that can happen,” Mark Epstein said in an interview Monday with “Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.”
Mark said he initially had “no reason to doubt” that his brother, 66, did kill himself in 2019 while awaiting a federal sex trafficking trial, as authorities have said. “I knew he was in jail. He was potentially facing a very long term. I knew he wouldn’t want to live like that.”
But he said his views changed after going to identify his brother’s body and speaking with a forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy. He also heard from a second pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, whom he hired to witness the procedure on his behalf.
“They both came out of the autopsy room and they said they couldn’t call it a suicide because it looked too much like a homicide. Now that never appears in any government report and no one’s speaking about that. The two qualified forensic pathologists who did the autopsy could not call it a suicide because it looked too much like a homicide,” he said.
He questioned why New York City’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Samson, would later declare his brother’s death to be a suicide, while accusing her of never personally examining his body or attending the autopsy herself.
“After the autopsy was over that day, we claimed the body. So she never saw it,” he said.
Samson has hit back against doubts previously shared by Dr. Baden, who briefly served as New York City’s medical examiner and who raised questions about broken bones found in Jeffrey Epstein’s neck.
“I stand firmly behind our determination of the cause and manner of death in this case,” she told The New York Times. “In general, fractures of the hyoid bone and the cartilage can be seen in suicides and homicides.”
Mark Epstein has previously spoken out against authorities’ findings while even suggesting that his former friend President Donald Trump could have played a role.
“We know that Jeffrey had dirt on Donald Trump. We know that. That’s a fact,” he told Don Lemon in an interview earlier this month.
Mark claimed that in 2016 his brother told him that if he ever spoke publicly about what he knew about Trump, they’d have to cancel the presidential race that Trump was running in.
“He didn’t tell me what he knew, but that’s what he said, and I’ve been public about that before, that shouldn’t come as a shock,” he said. “He didn’t tell me what he knew, but he said if he said what he knew, he’d have to cancel the election. That’s a direct quote.”
Believing there are more questions than answers, Mark said he wants more information released, including by Trump’s former White House adviser Steve Bannon, who claims to have hours worth of footage of him and Epstein talking in 2019.
“Let me see the videotapes,” Mark Epstein told NBC News on Friday. “He’s my brother.”
Bannon has said that he plans to release the footage early next year as part of a documentary he’s working on. The documentary, he told The New York Times in 2021, will show how Epstein’s “perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and his influence.”