Why “Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” Started Trending Almost Three Months After His Death

On July 6, 2019, financier Jeffrey Epstein, a rapist and convicted pedophile, was arrested yet again, this time on new charges of sex trafficking minors in Florida and New York. The immediate speculation after Epstein’s latest arrest was whether or not others long-rumored to be associated with him would finally be exposed for committing potentially heinous crimes. But a month later, on August 10, Epstein was found dead in his cell. As soon as news of his death hit, conspiracy theories about the circumstances abounded, with many surmising that powerful people wanted to keep him silent. Everything seemed a tad fishy: that the broken bones in his neck often indicated strangulation, that two guards slept through checks and falsified records. But New York City Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson ruled that death was a suicide, and reporters on the criminal justice system relayed that prison suicides are frequent and guards overworked.

As the news cycle churned, the story faded a bit. That was until this week, almost three months after his death, when the hashtags #EpsteinSuicideCoverUp and #EpsteinDidNotKillHimself suddenly starting trending. Where did the newfound public interest come from?

On Saturday, November 2, former Navy Seal Mike Ritland appeared on Fox News program Watters World. Jesse Watters interviewed Ritland, who now runs a service called the Warrior Dog Foundation, about retired military dogs, who are having a moment after one such active-duty dog may or may not have helped kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. At the end of the segment, Ritland asked to give a pooch-related PSA, which he concluded by surprise announcing:”Epstein didn’t kill himself.” The clip instantly went viral.

In an email to GQ, Ritland wrote that he wanted to say something because he was “trying to keep [the Epstein story] in the news so it doesn’t get forgotten about.” It followed a trickle of lower-profile stories on Epstein. Just a few weeks ago, on October 12, The New York Times reported that Bill Gates started hanging out with Epstein after the latter was convicted of sex crimes, a disturbing revelation that Gates’s team didn’t bat down very convincingly.

Beginning in 2011, Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein on numerous occasions — including at least three times at Mr. Epstein’s palatial Manhattan townhouse, and at least once staying late into the night, according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the relationship, as well as documents reviewed by The New York Times. Employees of Mr. Gates’s foundation also paid multiple visits to Mr. Epstein’s mansion. And Mr. Epstein spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund — an arrangement that had the potential to generate enormous fees for Mr. Epstein. “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me,” Mr. Gates emailed colleagues in 2011, after his first get-together with Mr. Epstein.