Michael Barbaro

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

This is The Daily.

Today, the untold story of Jeffrey Epstein's final weeks, days, and hours inside a Manhattan jail.

My colleague, Charles Homans, takes us inside a major new investigation by The Times that tries to answer the question that refuses to go away.

Did the world's most powerful and well-connected sex offender die by his own hand or by somebody else's?

It's Thursday, June 18th.

Charlie, why at this stage in the Jeffrey Epstein story, seven years after his death, when all eyes are on his network of friends and his enablers, his victims, all the politics around the release of the Epstein files, why did you all undertake this inquiry into his death right now?

As somebody who has written a lot about conspiratorial thinking in American life, I'm curious what you yourself think of that viewpoint.

Well, we're going to get to that conclusion, but I want to do it by having you reconstruct the story you all found in your reporting.

And let's, for the purposes of our storytelling here, pick up with what happens after this employee clocks Epstein's despondency, his distraughtness, as he's coming in.

He's basically saying, get me the hell out of this cell.

I don't want to be the next person killed by this alleged multi-killer.

His incentives are to be, in this logic, as good to Epstein as possible

He is despondent.

And what does Epstein's cellmate do with this really ominous question?

This behavior seems like a real tell, right?

about how miserable he is.

But I'm curious what, at this point, Epstein is telling people outside of jail, to the degree he has access to them, about his state of mind.

This is horrible.

what we've come to understand to be his first attempt at potentially dying by suicide.