A United States judge has released a document described as a suicide note purportedly written by the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein The handwritten note was said to have been found by Epstein's former jail cellmate and was made public on Wednesday after it had been sealed in a courthouse vault for nearly five years as part of an unrelated legal dispute.US District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, New York, ordered the note's release after The New York Times petitioned last week to unseal it and other documents in a case involving the cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione."No party has identified any competing consideration that would justify sealing the Note," the judge ruled.Karas said existing case law suggests that the privacy interests of a deceased person, such as Epstein, "are vastly reduced and disclosure of the deceased's information is unlikely to 'work a concrete harm'".The letter, which is handwritten on lined paper and has not been authenticated, dates to what was believed to be Epstein's unsuccessful suicide attempt in July 2019, less than two weeks before he died.Few people had known about the note until Tartaglione, a former police officer who is serving a life sentence for killing four people, mentioned it on a podcast last year.The Times newspaper reported the note was never seen by federal investigators and was absent from millions of Epstein-related documents recently released by the US Justice Department.Tartaglione claimed he discovered it in a book in his cell after Epstein was found after the suicide attempt on 23 July 2019