Jeffrey Epstein Death Mystery: Doctor Challenges Hanging Verdict After Seven Years

The body was already cold when the questions began.

In the early hours of 10 August 2019, Jeffrey Epstein – the disgraced financier whose name had become shorthand for wealth, depravity and impunity – was found unresponsive in his cell at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Centre. Within hours, officials were briefing that he had died by suicide. Within days, the conspiracy theories were louder than the facts.

Seven years on, one of the few people who actually saw Epstein's body in the aftermath is still not buying the official line.

Jeffrey Epstein Death Mystery Rekindled By Veteran Pathologist

Dr Michael Baden is not an internet sleuth or an aggrieved relative. He is 92 years old, a veteran forensic pathologist, a former chief medical examiner for New York City, and a man who has spent a lifetime staring at the blunt reality of violent death.

Baden was in the room for Epstein's post-mortem, invited as an observer by the Epstein family. Speaking to The Telegraph, he has now renewed his call for the case to be reopened, bluntly stating that he believes Epstein was 'strangled, not hanged.'

'My opinion is that his death was most likely caused by strangulation pressure rather than hanging,' Baden said, directly contradicting the New York Medical Examiner's Office, which ruled Epstein's death a suicide by hanging.

What makes this especially awkward for the authorities is Baden's account of what happened immediately after the autopsy. He says that, at the time, both he and the official medical examiner present agreed the findings were inconclusive and that more information was needed. Epstein's death certificate initially reflected that caution: cause of death pending further investigation.

Five days later, that provisional uncertainty vanished. The then–chief medical examiner, Dr Barbara Sampson, who Baden says did not attend the post-mortem, issued a firm ruling: suicide. The inconclusive line was quietly superseded.

Sampson has consistently defended her conclusion and dismissed Baden's strangulation theory. Yet the mere fact that two of New York's most experienced forensic voices remain so publicly at odds over such a high-profile death speaks to a deeper unease. This is not just about ligature marks on a neck; it is about whether one of the most politically explosive prisoners in recent US history really managed to kill himself in a supposedly secure federal facility – and whether the state is prepared to re-examine its own version of events.

A Death That Refuses To Stay Buried

The Jeffrey Epstein death mystery has never fully receded, largely because the circumstances still read like a checklist of public mistrust.

Epstein was arrested on 6 July 2019 on sex trafficking charges brought by New York prosecutors who argued they were not bound by a controversial non-prosecution deal he had secured in Florida over a decade earlier. He was, in effect, the embodiment of the question: how far does money and influence really go? His trial, had it proceeded, threatened to cast a harsh light on others in his orbit.

Instead, on 10 August, he was found dead. The official narrative – that a man facing the rest of his life in prison took his own life – is not inherently implausible. But nearly every surrounding detail has been combustible.

There were failures and 'irregularities' at the jail. Guards were said to have been asleep or falsifying logs. Cameras in certain crucial areas were not recording properly. Into this already murky picture come the latest files and CCTV descriptions, which only deepen the sense that something about that night refuses to align neatly.

Recently released material includes footage from the morning Epstein's body was discovered, showing guards moving between a security desk and his cell, then suddenly running. More intriguing still is an FBI report referring to a 'flash of orange' seen on the night of 9 August 2019 – apparently moving up the L Tier stairs towards the floor where Epstein was held.

To some investigators, that 'flash of orange' looked like an inmate being escorted upstairs. Others insisted it was just a correctional officer. The ambiguity is almost farcical, except that the stakes are not.

At the time, then–attorney general Bill Barr declared he had personally reviewed video from the area and was satisfied that no one had entered Epstein's unit on the night of his death. That should have been reassuring. Instead, the conflicting interpretations of the very same footage have become another loose thread in an already frayed narrative.

Baden, for his part, says his findings remain what they were on 11 August 2019: inconclusive, but leaning away from suicide. He points to injuries he believes are more consistent with manual strangulation than self-hanging – details that have been pored over, argued about and weaponised endlessly in the years since.

It is easy, at this point, to dismiss renewed scrutiny as just more oxygen for conspiracists. But that is too convenient. Epstein's lawyers were reportedly dissatisfied with the suicide ruling. The family brought in an independent expert. Senior forensic figures cannot agree on the basic mechanism of his death. Add to that an institutionally embarrassing trail of prison failures and contested CCTV, and it becomes harder to argue that all legitimate questions have been answered.

What this episode ultimately reveals is not merely the fate of one man – a convicted sex offender whose victims are still navigating the wreckage he left behind – but the brittle state of public trust in official investigations. When a case this sensitive is wrapped up swiftly, without a transparent resolution to the disagreements between the experts who saw the body, doubt is not a fringe reaction; it is almost rational.

Baden is 92. He is not, realistically, waging a career crusade. His insistence, after all this time, that the Epstein file deserves another look may not prove him right. But it underlines something New York's authorities would rather not acknowledge: you cannot close the book on a death like this simply by stamping 'suicide' on the final page and hoping everyone stops reading.

Originally published on IBTimes UK