Hacker News Reader

Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

This case has taken on such a life of it's own. We'll see what these documents reveal but I'd wager it's nothing terribly salacious. We really have no reason to believe he ensnared anyone aside from maybe Prince Andrew in anything illicit. Some third hand source said he had all this compromising information on the rich and powerful and everyone just believed it. It's still possible but just isn't very likely.

View on HN

> but just isn't very likely.

He "took his own life" under very suspect circumstances. I wouldn't put that down as isn't very likely.

Considering how hard life in prison is for child molesters I would still bet on the simplest theory that he killed himself to avoid years of torture and possibly death at the hands of his fellow inmates.

That doesn’t mean that the other crimes shouldn’t be investigated to see if there are links to people still living but I would be surprised if this turned out to be more than him taking the quick way out. The hardest part of a conspiracy is keeping a secret and something like this is so explosive that that it seems like that would be unusually hard to do.

I think it is even simpler. He was an extreme sex addict that was use to getting 3 massages with a happy ending a day and having a private chef.

Once he knew he was going to spend life in prison he ended it.

The dumbest thing about the conspiracy is OBVIOUSLY Ghislaine Maxwell would have also been taken out if the conspiracy was true. The conspirators go through all this trouble to get to someone in prison but don't do anything to someone that was just walking the street. People are just suckers for a good narrative.

Also, he was old with no realistic hope of being free again. It’s really not a stretch to imagine someone like that deciding they had no reason to stick it out.

killed himself, disabled the cameras pointed at his cell, and made the guards skip their 30 minute wellness checks.

> made the guards skip their 30 minute wellness checks

Honestly, this shouldn't be surprising.

My dad's a doc, and it's not an uncommon occurrence for a patient to have perfect vitals logged in the chart all day, then crash, in a way that means they couldn't possibly have had perfect vitals all day. People half-ass their jobs all the time.

Yep. And your dad presumably actually cares about his patients. These guards likely didn't care if Epstein got hurt, which made them even more likely to half-ass it.

A good point, but to be clear, it's not the doc doing the false charting in this example.

Or he made use of the fact that the guards were incompetent to kill himself while they were not checking on him, in order to avoid the abuse and violence against him that would certainly happen to him as a well known child molester in prison.

Prison guards being lazy is the least suspicious thing about this.

Also his cellmate, who would have seen any wrong-doing, was coincidentally reassigned that day.

Found “hung” in a kneeling position, which any skeptic needs to think through carefully… this isn’t like a western hanging with gallows and gravity; if you really believe he didn’t kill himself, then he must have somehow just pulled his own head until he died, a frankly unbelievable force of will, akin to holding one’s own breathe til they perished.

If a conspiracy theory is when you have to believe some pretty silly things in order for it to be true, then the actual conspiracy theory is that he committed suicide.

Camera story was false. There was recovered footage of his block for the entire time leading up to his death and no one approached his cell.

My read of the articles is that they have footage from a hall or something but not of the immediate area: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205

Regardless, it proves the point that the news system is not helping bubble up truth here. Is this bbc article outdated? Is there nuance in the reports they “found the video” that is lost? Where is the most recent conclusive answers to some of the obvious questions around this situation?

> Federal prosecutors have found surveillance video of the area around the cell of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on the day of his first jailhouse suicide attempt, according to a new court filing. Earlier this week, they said the footage was missing.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/12/20/video-of-jeffrey-epstein...

Hmm. Is there footage of his success?

There was never a camera pointed into his cell. It was not standard practice to watch everyone directly all the time.

Going with Occam's razor, I suspect you're right. But there were suspicious circumstances, like the security guards falling asleep and CCTV being accidentally deleted. But I have no idea how often that happens otherwise.

It was a jail that specialized in high profile cases (terrorists, El Chapo, poor ol’ Ross Ulbrect), and he was the first person to die there in 14 years.

Footage was not deleted. It was initially reported that footage was corrupted or otherwise unrecoverable but it turned out to be false.

Again, you're layering speculation on top of speculation in some childish fantasy that the entire moneyed elite are not only complete ghouls but that they decided they should all share in their illegal indulgences in the presence of each other and some untrustworthy host who was secretly recording everything. It just isn't very plausible. A pampered rich man with taste for underage girls killing themselves rather than facing a life sentence is very plausible. Surely there's some bits that remain undiscovered but the chances of an elaborate conspiracy are nil. And we have nearly zero evidence to support any of it.

You're ignoring the multitude of suspicious circumstances around his death, and the fact that we know of at least one moneyed elite (prince Andrew) who did in fact to share in his illegal indulgences in the presence of / with the facilitation of Epstein. We also know for example that Melinda Gates decided to divorce Bill Gates after 27 years explicitly because of his ties to Epstein - obviously that's not legally usable evidence, but it should count for something when calculating your priors.

Epstein was a predator and he definitely shared his hobby with Prince Andrew at least once. He very likely shared it with at least some other people, who were likely rich or powerful in some regard. That's the farthest we can extrapolate based on reliable evidence.

The notion that keeps floating around that he had entrapped the entire ruling class of the world and had detailed records of their crimes that he wielded over their heads to collect favors is highly improbable. The further notion that the known existence of all that compromising evidence was the impetus for jailhouse assassination with the explicit involvement of the Attorney General on down to the guards leaving nary a trace of evidence whilst simultaneously letting Ghislaine Maxwell walk free and clear is just absurd.

Bill Gates should not have spent time with him but there's no way he needed anyone's help to get laid. Melinda didn't like that they were associated, but she divorced him because he kept having affairs with adult women that worked for him.

> he ensnared

Are you implying Prince Nonce was somehow hoodwinked into taking part in a paedophile ring against his will?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com