Handwriting Pros Have Some Thoughts on Alleged Epstein Note

A note that a former cellmate said he discovered after Jeffrey Epstein's first suspected jail suicide attempt was all but certainly penned by the same person who wrote a note that authorities found in the millionaire sex offender's cell after he killed himself, handwriting experts say. Three forensic document examiners who reviewed the notes at the request of the AP concluded that they have or appear to have common authorship, with shared characteristics such as the same spacing, letter shapes, usage of capital letters, and unique punctuation.

In the first note, made public this week, the writer states: "They investigated me for month—found nothing!!!" and talks about being able to choose the "time to say goodbye." The other note, which has been public for years, is a list of grievances about conditions at the jail, including the showers, food, and "Giant Bugs." While no one has definitively said Epstein wrote the notes, they possibly point to his grim outlook before his death and echo some frustrations he conveyed to jail personnel about being confined in the crumbling Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan after living in luxury for decades. They also contain phrases he'd used in the past.

Both notes, written in pen on notepad paper, include the underlined phrase "NO FUN" and end with double exclamation points—the first of which is bowed slightly with similar curvature. The first few words of each note are larger than the rest, and each successive line slants away from the left margin. "They are written by the same person," says Bart Baggett of forensic analysis firm Handwriting Experts Inc. "Both of those documents have the same author," concurs Grace Warmbier, who worked for a decade for the NYPD performing document examinations and handwriting analysis.

None of the experts were able to say definitively that Epstein wrote the notes, in part because there are few, if any, confirmed examples of his handwriting in the millions of pages of records the DOJ recently released on the late financier. Experts also reviewed writing samples from the former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione. Warmbier ruled out Tartaglione as the author, finding "significant dissimilarities between his handwriting and the handwriting in question," but Thomas Vastrick, of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, said Tartaglione's writing samples had "a wide range of variation from one to another" and that there were at least some similarities that require further examination. More here, and here.