Report 23-085
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General · Report 23-085 · June 2023
The document almost every account of Epstein’s death is ultimately relying on, usually at second or third hand. Read directly it is more specific than the summaries — and on one central point, the camera, it says close to the opposite of what is commonly reported.
Open the PDF — 128 pages, 5.7 MB
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What is on which page
The camera — the most misreported finding in the case
“While the camera inside the L Tier was working and transmitting live video, the video was not being recorded.” The camera was not broken. It was live and watchable in real time; the DVR was not saving the stream. Accounts that say the camera outside Epstein’s cell “failed” or “was not operating” — including, until this audit, our own case file — have the fact backwards.
Why the OIG thought that mattered
The report draws the inference the shorthand loses: inmates “would have been aware that any hallway movements, including into or out of Epstein’s cell, could be monitored by BOP staff, even if, unbeknownst to them, the DVR system was not recording the live stream at that time.” Anyone entering that tier had to assume they were being watched. That is the OIG’s argument against a killing, and it is a better one than “no evidence was found”.
The gap in supervision, stated exactly
“SHU staff did not conduct any 30-minute rounds after about 10:40 p.m. on August 9 and… none of the required SHU inmate counts were conducted after 4 p.m. on August 9. Count slips and round sheets were falsified to show that they had been performed.” Epstein was found at approximately 6:30 a.m. on 10 August — roughly seven hours and fifty minutes after the last round. The report adds that “after approximately 10:40 p.m., no CO entered Epstein’s tier in the SHU until just before 6:30 a.m.”
What the two staff were doing
CO Tova Noel and Material Handler Michael Thomas — note that only one of the two was a correctional officer — “were seated at the SHU Officers’ Station without moving and appeared to be sleeping” from about 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. Noel used the computer through the night “to search the Internet for furniture sales and benefit websites and to read a news article about Epstein”; Thomas searched “for motorcycle sales and sports news”. Thomas “admitted to the OIG that he ‘dozed off’”.
The suicide-watch chronology
“Epstein was removed from suicide watch on July 24 but remained under psychological observation until July 30.” The two dates are routinely conflated into a single 30 July removal; they are different events six days apart.
The conclusion, in the report’s own words
“While the OIG determined MCC New York staff engaged in significant misconduct, we did not uncover evidence contradicting the FBI’s determination regarding the absence of criminality in connection with how Epstein died. We did not find, for example, evidence that anyone was present in the SHU area where Epstein was housed during the relevant timeframe other than the inmates who were locked in their assigned cells.” Note the formulation: did not uncover evidence contradicting, not found no evidence of. The report is careful about the difference and paraphrases usually are not.
Note on the cover page. Page 1 of the published PDF carries the banner “LIMITED OFFICIAL USE - PROPRIETARY INFORMATION” and, a few characters later, the words “HEADER TEXT GOES HERE”. Both are unreplaced placeholders from the OIG’s report template, left on the cover of the version the Inspector General published on its own public website; the banner appears once in 128 pages and nowhere in the body. We record it because a reader who opens the file will see it and reasonably wonder.
What this report does not settle
It is an investigation of the Bureau of Prisons, not of the death. Its subject is custody, supervision and the conduct of staff, and its finding on the manner of death is expressed as an absence — it did not uncover evidence contradicting the FBI. It does not analyse the autopsy, does not adjudicate between the Chief Medical Examiner and Dr Michael Baden, and does not address anything outside MCC New York.
Provenance and licence
Released by: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Investigations Division. Report number 23-085, June 2023.
Original copy: oig.justice.gov, the Inspector General’s own publication of the report.
Licence: Public domain — work of the U.S. federal government.
How this copy was checked: Downloaded from oig.justice.gov; 5,975,538 bytes, SHA-256 761f57f598dd9b555088040b2bfc55c622d2a2b7681f19220aac71131e373c1e, byte-identical to the hosted copy. 128 pages, all 128 carrying a text layer. Page 1 reads “Investigation and Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Custody, Care, and Supervision of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, New York — INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION — 23-085 — JUNE 2023”. Every passage quoted above was located in that text layer on 7 September 2026.
128 pages · 5.7 MB · PDF