Man helpfully declares "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" at the tail end of a Fox News interview
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Refusing to believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself is nominally a conspiracy theory, but it’s hardly as controversial as the sort of fringe beliefs that are usually grouped under that heading. It’s tough to imagine that Epstein, a pedophile sex trafficker with ties to figures ranging from Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew to Bill Gates, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, and Elon Musk, simply took his own life before a trial that would implicate some of the most powerful people in the world.
Because it’s 2019, though, the media has mostly moved on from the story (barring developments like new arguments against the suicide theory reported last week), leaving the job of trying to grapple with the reality of what seems to be a poorly covered-up, very public assassination to internet meme creators instead. The most recent—and highest profile—example of this comes from a Fox News segment on military-trained dogs featuring Warrior Dog Foundation founder Mike Ritland. Just before he’s finished signing off with “a PSA” about dog adoption, Ritland drops in a quick reminder that “Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
Ritland’s comment, being aired on TV, is notable, but it’s far from the only example of people trying to keep the story alive through unexpected avenues. Consider the below, which represents only a very small sampling of the meme’s recent explosion.
An excellent piece on the meme by Mel Magazine’s Miles Klee, published just before the Fox News segment aired, describes the kind of “simmering resentment” that’s responsible for the meme’s proliferation. For one thing, though the Fox clip seems to have led to a big increase in right-wing versions of the meme, it’s bipartisan, implicating the worst on both sides of the aisle. It’s also representative of public anger at a system that allows those who took part in or enabled the nightmares of Epstein’s trafficking ring to escape any kind of justice.
“We have seen so many guilty parties go unpunished, so many pervasive horrors dismissed or blamed on lone scapegoats, that this small rebellion was critical and inevitable,” Klee writes. “As long as a few dogged trolls are churning out content to disrupt the assurance that the whole matter is behind us, there remains a dim hope that someone else will have to see their day in court.”
Until Adam McKay’s Epstein-focused TV series sees the light of day, we’ll probably just have to keep making do with nihilistic memes to get through. Since we can’t even count on late night TV hosts to care about the horrifying surrealism of the event beyond its use as fodder for softball interview jokes, the roiling collective consciousness of the internet will have to do for now.
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82 Comments
i don’t get why this is a thing. haven’t people believed this all along?
Yes, and he is a DEAD pedophile…which is the best kind in my books. But my hardcore Right Wing ‘friends’ have this bastard’s face pasted all over their social media with lame memes about “Clinton”-this and “Clinton”-that. See, Epstein’s death has unleashed a whole ton of “This is about THE CLINTONS”. Epstein’s self-sacrifice has enabled Right Wingers the opportunity to bash Hillary and Bill once more. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah but authorities and mainstream media aren’t doing anything about it (because the owners are all in Epstein’s black book regardless of supposed political affiliation) so it’s a grassroots effort to keep this in the public consciousness.
Not that this article does this, but the initial coverage of the whole country’s brain breaking over Epstein’s very obvious murder referring to it as a “conspiracy theory” is one of the things that convinced me. Like, I know it’s a conspiracy theory by definition, but the lack of incredulity from mainstream sources was baffling. Nothing added up at all and the response was just “don’t worry about it!”
Problem is, there’s no actual evidence, is there? I mean I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was true, but I don’t think there’s anything anyone can actually point to that gives any indication as to a specific perpetrator.
You’d have to get the two guards who “fell asleep” to spill the beans. They’re probably frightened out of their minds, so idk – that’s another problem.
It’s actually not that far fetched that the guards were asleep. Prison guards are really bad at their jobs.
I know, you’re right. But putting it on a pie graph, 77% would be the guards know what happened or suspect (you tooz guyz take a bat-room break and don’t axe questions) … 12% would be that they legit fell asleep … 10% would be that they were drugged … a subset of the above would be that management purposefully worked the two a double-triple shift waiting for them to conk-out, and then sent in whomever killed Epstein. 1% allowed for voodoo or remote-viewing assassination; Aliens, Dracula and shit.
You’re giving prison guards way too much credit. These are people who were rejected by the military, the police, private security, etc. I’d say it’s about a 95% chance they were sleeping. A prison guard’s job description is 95% sleeping 5% committing civil rights abuses.
Yeah, I’ll give you that. Still, they didn’t know this was the world famous Jeffrey Epstein – billionaire pedophile? You’d think they’d have perked up a bit. But I’d further grant you that they may have been too stupid or wiped out to care.
They didn’t know or care. The whole point is not caring.
Except for the numerous forensic pathologists who have indicated that the injuries sustained are more representative of strangulation, than death by hanging. Its a pretty impressive list of coincidences and happenstance that would lead to him being able to kill himself undetected too.
https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1162378738484633600This seems to indicate that it’s a little more vague than that. Like I said, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turns out to be the case. But right now, it looks like there’s enough doubt all around to at least give the media plausible deniability.
People who hang themselves aren’t professional executioners. They end up dying by strangulation a lot of the time.
They’re pointing a specific neck bone being broken. And its broken in about more than half of all strangulation. However, its also broken in roughly 27% of suicides. That’s not an insignificant number. And its mostly because people hanging themselves aren’t professional executioners manning the gallows. They end up fighting and strangling themselves.
So when people use that to say and imply his injuries are not self inflicted is a mischaracterization and borders on reckless.
I think I read that the coroner’s report said the marks on his neck did not look like they were self-inflicted.I did not read the report, and I forget where I heard that, so I don’t know for sure. But I think that is part of the theory.
Doesn’t seem to be the case: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/16/jeffrey-epstein-cause-of-death-coroner-report
Agreed. People die in prison by suicide all the fucking time. I mean I guess it’s a possibility someone killed him. But this is also a weasley piece of shit of raped young girls and was finally put in a jail and he probably couldn’t take the rest of his life was gonna be behind bars. And Why wouldn’t this guy been rattting on people immediately after getting arrested? You see how fast Takashi started talking after getting arrested.
The only problem is that he hadn’t gone to trial as of yet, and convicted to be worrying about spending ex-amount of time in jail. If his defense lawyers got the judge to agree to bail I can tell you he would have fled quietly into that goodnight.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You clearly have no idea about the history of Epstein in the legal system. He got like six months and put on the sex offender registry last time he got caught trying to recruit high school girls in Florida, his butler got more time for trying to sell the black book Epstein kept. Epstein could’ve put up quite a big legal fight and probably would have some powerful people in his pocket to get any sentence pushed way the fuck down and just spend a few months in a white collar prison. This was before the trial ever even started and he had made plans to meet with his lawyer the weekend after he ended up getting suicided. Buying this story of his death being anything less than shady as hell is one of the most ignorant positions someone can take in this the year of our Lord 2019.
NO I dont know about Epstein but just like R Kelly skated for years,after going to trial being found not guilty and having a sex tape everyone saw. he got his too. So maybe Epstein would have walked again or maybe this time since there was a lot more media coverage about Epstein this time around, he would have been convicted and sent to jail.
It’s possible that he’d have gotten the book thrown at him this time, but that’s part of the point, he had no idea how things would’ve gone, but he would’ve know that things tend to go his way in these matters. It doesn’t make much sense that he’d go ahead and off himself before having some idea of how things were going to go.
There was a previous attempt that failed. But conspiracy theorists will conveniently ignore the fact that people would be saying “hey, they tried to kill me” after that 1st failed attempt.
Nah, they just waited and got him a 2nd time. *eyeroll*
Yeah, that’s where I can’t totally believe he was murdered. It’s still a glaring question as to who got in there to do it and who is covering it up?
Yeah, I have no idea of the facts of Epstein’s death, and I’m not going to confidently claim one thing or the other. But when you’re talking about a pedophile who could spend his entire life in prison as the most hated type of criminal, it’s not absurd to imagine that person killing himself. Especially (and this is not in any way sympathy for such people, cause fuck them) when you consider that self-loathing can often be part of a pedophile’s pathology.
Exactly. All things being equal, the simplest solution is most often correct. Imagine being a millionaire, then getting arrested and denied bail. You are now in a federal prison for life as a known pedophile. ie: you’re fucked. He killed himself.
I do love the idea that people think that rich people can just pay anyone to kill someone else. Like, I know rich people get away with a lot of shit, but murder is rarely one of them. And hiring a random person(s) in a jail.. how would you someone even go about that? In less than 3 weeks after he’s arrested, no less.
There’s always *some* plausible deniability to these things, and of course the finger pointing as to who did it and why (Clinton or Trump or the Royal Family) that credible media sources want to avoid.
It could also have been that Epstein was “encouraged” to kill himself by someone, or simply allowed to die by a prison system that has a hierarchy that puts pedophiles on the bottom, for understandable reasons. At any rate, mainstream sources should be digging deeper into this.
The only digging they should be doing is how lazy and broken the prison system and larger criminal justice system is. Because all of the coincidences people point to are not uncommon because our country’s prisons have gotten quite dysfunctional.
I was with a group of friends when we heard the news and the spouse of a friend works in Texas’ Criminal Justice system. He immediately said don’t attribute malice when simple negligence covers the issue. Prison guards are low paid, mostly untrained and as a society we don’t really care when they do something that results in a dead inmate. It’s a system designed for the type of negligence it would take for Epstein to kill him self.
The guy knew there was no way he was ever not going to be in prison again. What’s his incentive to keep on living?Also the idea that he’s the one with the ability to bring down Trump or Clinton (depending on whether you prefer a left or right wing conspiracy) because only he knows that they had sex with minors is totally absurd. That’s assuming that the girls in question somehow managed to sleep with Clinton or Trump and either forgot all about it or didn’t know who they were.
Yeah because women 44 accusing Trump would be the one to be believed. Sadly no victim would carry the weight of a billionaire paedophile naming him.
His supporters wouldn’t believe anyone. Jesus could come down and accuse Trump of assault and everyone would be calling the Messiah a partisan liar.
No, no! He was totally killed. You see, these powerful people who knew he could rat them out and was likely going to get arrested waited until AFTER he was arrested and imprisioned to kill him instead of killing him as free man when it’s far easier since you don’t have to pass various security levels. So you gotta do it
Him dying in prison is lazy but still way less suspicious than him getting killed waiting for an arrest.
Not in the least considering the reason for his shady plea deal the first time around was to avoid prison at all costs.
He’d been on this row before and had gotten out of it. By his lawyer’s accounts he was feeling great about his odds just days before (as he should have, because we don’t really punish the rich).
He got off before when it wasn’t getting a ton of publicity. This was very much not the case this time.
The thing is, didn’t he have a ton of photographic and video evidence on all his “clients”? Where is all that? How did all of that disappear?
Thank you. That was huge news when it happened (I remember arguing with my conservative friend about who had more to fear from that information, Clinton or Trump). It was unbelievable the things that were going to come out. And then… nothing. We haven’t heard another thing about it, and I doubt we ever will. There’s not even any public clamoring for it. Among the legion of bad things Trump’s presidency has wrought, our attention spans are now ridiculously fucking short.
This one even started before he dies. There was wide spread speculation that he would die in prison and that would be the best thing for many powerful people. When he did die very soon after his incarceration, before he had any chance to name names in a plea or get anywhere near an actual trial, the conclusion was obvious whether it is right or wrong.
I’m at work, so I can’t listen to video, but just looking at the guy, I’m wondering, did he say “himself” or “hisself”?
Himself. I would have probably said hisself but I pronounce ‘probably’ as ‘prolly’ so I’m not the one to talk to about enunciation and related topics.“Ee’s prolly jes talkin’ fancy so he don’t ‘barass hisself on the TV.”
Extremely over this meme. It buries how terrible of a person Epstein was under a mountain of poorly-executed humor.
You’re calling it a meme. Clearly people like this man and others are not. They care. Which is why I personally think this article did this clip a disservice by including stupid shitty twitter nonsense with it.
People out there still talking about the Kennedy assassination aren’t all doing it for the lulz either, you know. Sometimes people are sincere, even if this shitty article didn’t indicate that properly, imo.
It really depends on the circles you’re in. If you follow a lot of meme pages (which I, regrettably, do), it’s become ubiquitous. This is what I’m skewering.
No they don’t. They just want to circle jerk themselves over this conspiracy theory. That’s what conspiracy theories are about, indulging your paranoia and fantasies, not actually doing things.
“poorly-executed”. I see what you did there, despite the cameras being turned off.
So like… which side support which theory? Is the left debunking this or supporting it because he got killed cuz he had evidence on Trump? Or is it like the article says, the right thinks he got killed cuz Hillary did it…
The left wants this exposed because raping children is bad. The right wants this exposed because they hate the Clintons.
The Online Left also hate the Clintons, let it be known.
A lot of people on the left have no love for Hillary either. There are supporters of the theory on both sides of the aisle, but the proponents on the left don’t really care for most of Epstein’s known associates, so a meme that implicates the Clintons, Trump, the Royal Family, etc., is just gravy.
Aaccording to the alt right HRC is a killing machine aka Liberal Terminator (Vince Foster, Seth Rich, Epstein). Plus a pedophile (new children’s book? Hmm… ) A very busy lady who can multi-task well. RIP Deadspin. Not Epstein.
A lot of people are skeptical of the notion that Epstein killed himself. Some on the right and left believe Clinton was responsible. Others just don’t think it adds up and see a murderer’s row of potentially responsible parties.
What’s baffling to me is that folks think the Clintons, and not, I dunno, the current president whose administration is actually responsible for federal prisons, are the most likely culprits.Wanting pedophiles to be punished should be a nonpartisan issue and I have no love for the Clintons at all, but it bugs the hell out of me that folks who peddle in the conspiracy so often push out the part where Trump was definitely buddy buddy with Epstein as well. Burn the whole thing down.
Epstein’s murder was a bipartisan effort.
Now that is a ridiculous conspiracy theory. THAT will never happen.
It did happen.
Sure, Jan.Occam’s razor.
Suicide is only the most logical conclusion if you’re completely ignorant of everything surrounding Mr. Epstein.
Reaching across the aisle, and grabbing by the neck.
yep. there’s no way that it’s anyone but this current administration. you cannot have a rapist pedophile attached to jeffery epstein.
“It’s tough to imagine that Epstein, a pedophile sex trafficker with ties to figures ranging from Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew to Bill Gates, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, and Elon Musk, simply took his own life before a trial that would implicate some of the most powerful people in the world.”Under those conditions it’s easy to see how many people might believe he was murdered. For one, it’s easy because believing it costs nothing to the believer. Among other reasons is also that believers in conspiracies easily convince themselves they have access to truths The Sheeple do not.However, you should explain more deeply how it is difficult to imagine why a pedophile who has lived in the highest echelons of our society since essentially getting away with his crimes, and who was looking at spending the rest of his life in prison, might kill himself.Also, Jesse Watters is a pimple on the ass of a carbuncle that is itself on the ass of a boil on the ass of someone really gross. Like Jesse Watters, for example.
Where were these people with Sandra Bland?
Some of these are pretty funny.
Just curious, if AVClub is told to “stick to entertainment” then can it just [trying to contain my excitement] secede back to it’s own site again.
The fact that HRC did her famous cackling laugh over Trevor Noah’s question of “Did you kill Jeffrey Epstein?” same as she did after “We came. We saw. He (Moumar Qadafi) Died.” didn’t help.I Know. I Know. Bill and Hillary did not have murderous relations with that man.
9/11 WAS AN INSIDE SANDY HOOK PIZZAGATE JOB FROM TEH Q.
About as plausible as this article.
@reidmccarter didn’t read the article he cited. The pathologist hired by the Epstein family is neither credible nor authoritative.
“In 1995, when O.J. Simpson was on trial for the murders of his former wife and her companion, Dr. Baden testified that evidence pointed to Mr. Simpson’s innocence. He said that the timeline of Mr. Simpson’s whereabouts that night would not have given him enough time to commit the murders.”
These memes are fucking tiresome. Epstein killed himself. He was finally going to face the facts about what he did, and he was fucking terrified. Anyone would be.
He was taken off suicide watch, his cellmate was removed and not replaced (which is against prison policy), the two guards who were supposed to check in on him every 30 minutes both fell asleep, and two cameras monitoring his cell malfunctioned the night of his death. That’s a lot of coincidences.
Doesn’t necessarily add up to murder. If anything, it adds up to giving him the opportunity to complete what he started – his own suicide. That’s fucked up but it’s not murder.
Creating or sharing memes insisting he was murdered is not evidence of anything other than a person’s willingness to jump on a conspiracy bandwagon. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Memes ain’t proof, and the family’s doctor is not credible.
Yeah but killing him versus giving him the opportunity to kill himself is a distinction without a difference. The desired outcome was achieved either way.
That would be a novel interpretation of “murder.” I don’t think it would hold up in a court of law.
Conspiracy theories are a silly waste of time.
Right but what do you think suicide watch is even for? If you have any reason to believe someone would kill themselves if given the opportunity, and you remove the companion anyway, let the guards take a nap, then conveniently shut down the cameras watching that area, then don’t you think the guards, or the prison, or the warden would be at least somewhat liable if indeed the prisoner successfully committed suicide? Negligent homicide? Or something???
Now cover the conspiracy of Saudi holding the WWE talent hostage last week!
“Refusing to believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself is nominally a conspiracy theory, but it’s hardly as controversial as the sort of fringe beliefs that are usually grouped under that heading. It’s tough to imagine that Epstein, a pedophile sex trafficker with ties to figures ranging from Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew to Bill Gates, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, and Elon Musk, simply took his own life before a trial that would implicate some of the most powerful people in the world.Because it’s 2019, though, the media has mostly moved on from the story (barring developments like new arguments against the suicide theory reported last week), leaving the job of trying to grapple with the reality of what seems to be a poorly covered-up, very public assassination to internet meme creators instead.”—————-Yeah, that looks like a conspiracy theory to me. The simple explanation is that a person who abused and controlled people all his life did not want to spend the rest of their life in prison and give the people he abused any measure of control over him.The “reality” posited by this piece is a high-level conspiracy of famous people were all about to be named in a trial, and clearly at least one of them used their resources to kill Epstein in jail and not blow up the trial like the previous accusations against Epstein.
Listen to TrueAnon, the hilarious podcast that focuses on all the shenanigans surrounding Epstein’s case, then spirals out into other tangentially related conspiratorial nonsense, all worth it solely to take in the sound of co-host Liz’s sumptuous voice, while the other co-host Brace deftly blends his high-level sarcastic wit with unrelenting immature potty talk. Good times!
Please don’t lend credence to this kind of nonsense. Is it possible that Epstein was murdered? Theoretically. But it’s much more likely that a billionaire who just saw his whole life collapse decided to take his own life rather than wait out a trial.
And the Michael Baden stuff needs to be taken with a whole fucking salt mine. This is a guy hired by Epstein’s family. Baden is a hack who will say whatever his clients want him to say. This is a guy, after all, who testified that OJ Simpson was innocent.
This meme deserves to fucking die right alongside Epstein.