NEW YORK — A defense attorney wants a federal judge to hold a hearing to determine whether the federal government intentionally deleted video of the area around Jeffrey Epstein’s cell from the day he survived an apparent suicide attempt inside a New York jail.
The attorney for Epstein’s former cellmate filed a motion late Monday saying the missing footage would show Nicholas Tartaglione tried to help Epstein on July 23 when guards found the wealthy financier with bruises on his neck. Epstein later hanged himself Aug. 10 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
The request came days after federal prosecutors told U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas that video from the hallway outside the cell Epstein shared with Tartaglione ” no longer exists.”
Officials at the Metropolitan Correctional Center believed they had preserved the footage, prosecutors said, but they actually saved a video from a different part of the jail. The FBI determined the footage also does not exist on the jail’s backup video system “as a result of technical errors,” they wrote in a court filing.