Nicholas Tartaglione, once the cellmate of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York, revealed new details recently about a “pressure” campaign Epstein had been subjected to in the final days before his 2019 death, a campaign that Tartaglione claimed left the disgraced financier “visibly shaken,” and involved President Donald Trump.
The revelations were detailed on Sunday by writers Jessica Reed Kraus and Jay Beecher, who claimed to have spoken with Tartaglione directly.
Tartaglione said that one morning at around 5:30 a.m., multiple guards “banged on the cell door” and took Epstein away, Kraus and Beecher wrote in a report published on Kraus’ Substack, House Inhabit. Epstein was gone “most of the day” and when he returned “late that evening,” Tartaglione described him as “visibly shaken, anxious and withdrawn.”
“[Epstein] told [Tartaglione] that prosecutors had offered him the possibility of pleading to lesser charges and serving only a few years in a minimum-security camp, rather than dying in prison, if he could provide information that could be used to impeach Donald Trump,” the report reads.
“Epstein was explicit about the pressure being applied. He told [Tartaglione] that prosecutors had made clear the sooner he agreed to cooperate, the sooner he would be moved out of MCC. If he chose to go to trial, he would remain where he was.”
Tartaglione, according to Kraus and Beecher, “challenged” Epstein’s understanding of the deal he was allegedly being offered, and argued that the FBI ultimately “answered to the Trump administration,” suggesting the request to be a ruse.
Epstein, according to Tartaglione and as claimed by Kraus and Beecher, pushed back on Tartaglione’s assessment, telling him that “prosecutors told him the FBI were ‘their people,’ not Trump’s.”
Tartaglione admittedly “reacted angrily” to Epstein’s remarks, Kraus and Beecher reported, given his own situation. Tartaglione was serving four consecutive life sentences for having kidnapped and murdered four men in 2016, but has characterized himself as “the convenient fall guy” in a drug deal gone bad. Blaming his predicament in part on “cooperators lying to protect themselves,” Tartaglione told Epstein that “fabricated cooperation destroys innocent lives,” Kraus and Beecher reported.
Tartaglione claimed the confrontation prompted Epstein to accuse him of trying to kill him. Tartaglione has repeatedly denied attacking Epstein, though the incident remains disputed, with a corrections memo indicating Epstein had expressed fear of Tartaglione before later accusing him of assault.
