Charles Homans

You know, suspicions around Epstein's death have really been incredibly persistent from literally, you know, the hour that the story broke back in 2019.

People have been very suspicious of the official story, which from the beginning was that he died by suicide in his jail cell.

And there's just a lot about the story that has not sat well with people ever since.

And it's one of the very unique stories.

paranoid elements in American politics that really feels like it crosses pretty much all political boundaries.

I've certainly met conservatives and liberals and Trump supporters and Trump haters who all think that Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.

Right.

It's a bipartisan view that hasn't really dimmed.

Right.

I mean, this has been amplified online by literally everyone from Donald Trump to Hunter Biden at one point or another.

I think that I shared a pretty common skepticism about the official story of Epstein's death going into this reporting.

There was just a lot about it that seemed instinctively very strange.

There was this huge sort of cascade of mistakes and technical failures and just kind of weird mysteries around his death that was hard to, I think, take at face value for a lot of people.

And the suspicion around this case was really inflamed by the release of the Epstein files.

There are thousands of pages in the files relating to this series of federal investigations into Epstein's death.

There was one that immediately followed by the FBI and federal prosecutors.

And then there was one by the Office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department that went on for years after this.

And a lot of the raw materials of those investigations are in the Epstein files.

So my colleagues and I, Steve Eder, Jan Ransom, Michael Rothfeld, we dove into these papers a couple months ago and just started digging and seeing what was there.

So many of these files, there's just so many of them that even some of the stuff that's been out there