On August 10, 2019, 4chan, an anonymous forum best known for its porn, its toxic memes and its pandering to the ultra-right, beat all the media on the death of Jeffrey Epstein. At 8:16 a.m., a user posts: “Don’t ask me how I know this, but Epstein died an hour ago, hanged, of cardiac arrest. Take a screenshot.” Thirty-eight minutes later, ABC reporter Aaron Katersky announced on Twitter (now X) that the businessman accused of sex trafficking had died in Manhattan Metropolitan Prison.
This 4chan post is the first public record of Jeffrey Epstein’s death while he was still officially in the custody of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), explains Business Insider. The “Epstein Files” released by the Department of Justice reveal that this sequence obsessed federal investigators. Four days after the posts, the DOJ issued an injunction to 4chan to obtain the user’s IP addresses. The forum then provides four IPs, corresponding to the four messages posted that morning. From there, however, the trail cools down quickly.
Armed with these IPs, prosecutors then subpoena the AT&T provider to identify the subscribers who used them at the time of the posts. Dry response from the operator: “AT&T is unable to provide information in response to the legal request because AT&T does not maintain records (…) associating individual accounts or devices with dynamic wireless IP addresses,” explains an employee in a letter placed in the file. In other words, with dynamic IP addresses, the trace is lost. T‑Mobile was also contacted, but its response does not appear in the documents.
Several tracks have nevertheless been dug. In his posts, the anonymous author answers other users’ questions with precise medical jargon, talking about intubation, IV drips and a transfer to an emergency room in lower Manhattan. Enough to fuel the idea that it could be a caregiver or a rescuer. The FDNY, the New York Fire Department, will claim that this information does not match its own records and will conclude that none of its agents are involved.
White cabbage, therefore
In 2020, federal prosecutors in Manhattan finally admitted – in a letter resulting from the proceedings against the two supervisors accused of having falsified their rounds on the night of the suicide – that they never identified the author of 4chan. “The author of the message used a dynamic IP address, and the information obtained therefore did not identify the author of the message,” they write. Charges against the two guards will ultimately be dropped in 2021, and a 128-page DOJ Inspector General report on prison dysfunction won’t even mention the 4chan episode.
The anonymous messages were not limited to medical details, and quickly veered towards conspiracy theories. In a post since deleted, but sent to the FBI, the user claims, for example, that a mysterious van seen the day before convinced him that they swapped his body. This is one of the first versions of the thesis “Epstein is not really dead”, which then spread in conspiracy circles.
The same archives also show that Jeffrey Epstein was no stranger to 4chan: he visited the site, sent links to contacts and, above all, knew its founder, Christopher Poole, aka “moot”. The latter confirmed to The Verge that they met once for lunch and said “deeply regret ever having crossed his path”ensuring having a “deep sympathy for all his victims”.
The DOJ investigation establishes no concrete link between this relationship and the mysterious poster. But she draws a coherent background: that of a sexual predator fascinated by anonymous platforms and the internet underground. So who was behind these messages? We will probably never know, unless the FBI quietly continues its investigation.
