[imagesource: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images]

The greatest tragedy of Jeffrey Epstein’s death is the secrets he took with him, although through the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell we may still learn which powerful figures were most prominent in his orbit.

On the morning of August 10, 2019, Epstein was found dead in his Metropolitan Correctional Centre (MCC) cell, with the New York City medical examiner ruling the death a suicide by hanging.

It has been well established that Epstein feared for his safety in the prison, and now a new book by former National Enquirer executive editor Barry Levine sheds light on just how fearful he was.

Titled The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the Daily Beast features an excerpt that focuses on Epstein’s final stretch, and how he often moaned about bullies.

Levine claims that inmates soon found out about the nature of Epstein’s crimes (“the MCC was a hard place to keep secrets”), and inmates began to intimidate and extort him:

[Michael “Miles” Tisdale, who ran the Inmate Companion Program] said he heard about this effort initially from one of the guards and later from Epstein himself. “(Other inmates) tried to extort him… they tried to control him by selling him commissary items [like snacks, sodas, and certain meals] for way above what they’re supposed to be sold for.”

…In conversations with another one of his counselors, inmate William “Dollar Bill” Mersey, Epstein expressed the fear that he would be targeted by Black inmates…

As Mersey understood it, Epstein’s worries about his safety were related to his experiences and feelings about race. “He mentioned he’d been bullied at school in Coney Island by Black kids—not by Italians, not by the Irish, but by Black kids,” Mersey recalled.

Mersey says Epstein asked him if he needed a “big shvar” (a pejorative term for a black person) to have his back, with Mersey replying that he should simply “look fellow prisoners in the eye and stand his ground”.

It wasn’t long before Epstein was put on suicide watch, and we all know how that ended.

According to further excerpts from the book, reports the National Post, Epstein also had some candid conversations with fellow inmates about his past:

Epstein insisted to Tisdale that though he was accused of having sex with very young girls, they were in reality “fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen years old — not eight or nine years old!”.

Another former cellmate, William “Dollar Bill” Mersey, told Levine that Epstein said he once took a private jet flight with Trump and a girl aboard.

Epstein, according to Mersey, wouldn’t land in Atlantic City at Trump’s request, saying the city was full of “white trash.”

Epstein is reported to have said: “The girl I was with because she was French asked me, ‘What does white trash mean?’

“Donald Trump told her, ‘That would be me without the money.’”

In August, a lawsuit filed by a woman who alleges that she was abused by Epstein included claims that she was ‘shown’ to Trump at the age of 14.

Finally, the book is also going to cause further headaches for Prince Andrew, who is accused of receiving oral sex from Epstein ‘sex slave’ Virginia Roberts Giuffre in front of a 1,8-metre oil painting depicting her in a lesbian clinch.

You can read more on that here.

[sources:dailybeast&nationalpost]