Almost 3 minutes of footage missing from Epstein prison surveillance video
Two minutes and 53 seconds of footage showing the outside of Jeffrey Epstein's prison cell before his death appears to have been removed from the video.
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The Department of Justice (DoJ) and the FBI published 11 hours of footage amid calls for greater transparency regarding the Epstein case, which has been the subject of conspiracy theories for years.
Epstein died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for child sex trafficking charges, however, many people have expressed scepticism that this is how he died. Instead, there are theories that he was killed to keep him from talking.
Analysis of the metadata of the video by Wired has revealed that the 'full raw footage' of the evening was edited and saved repeatedly on May 23, 2025.
The video, which is almost 11 hours long, has a gap in the footage between 11:58:58pm and 12:00:00am that Attorney General Pam Bondi has attributed to a nightly system reset.
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It has been found to have been made using two video files, the first of which appears to continue for several more minutes after the 11:58pm cut, however, the second clip picks up again at midnight.
Wired's analysis found that the first clip is 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 16 seconds long, but only the first 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 23.368 seconds appear in the final version.
The cut to the footage takes place milliseconds before the one-minute nightly reset gap.
The video was edited and saved multiple times over a period of more than three and a half hours before it was exported and uploaded to the DoJ's website on July 14.
In a memo announcing its publication, the DoJ said that edits had been made to increase the brightness and contrast for greater clarity.
It went on to say: "After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019."