Tova Noel Is Finally Called to Answer
The House Oversight Committee has summoned Tova Noel, the correctional officer on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein died, to appear for a transcribed interview on March 26, 2026.
The House Oversight Committee has summoned Tova Noel, the correctional officer on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein died, to appear for a transcribed interview on March 26, 2026. The request comes as newly released Department of Justice files raise questions that federal prosecutors never got around to asking her.
Who Is Tova Noel?
Tova Noel was a Bureau of Prisons correctional officer assigned to the Special Housing Unit at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. She started working specifically in the SHU — the ninth-floor lockup where Epstein was being held — on July 7, 2019. She had been a federal CO since 2016.
On the night Epstein died, Noel worked a regular shift from 4 p.m. to midnight on August 9, then stayed on overtime through 8 a.m. on August 10. She was one of two officers on the floor when Epstein was found dead. The other was Michael Thomas.
Five Counts. Zero Rounds.
In November 2019, a grand jury in the Southern District of New York heard FBI testimony detailing what happened that night. The picture drawn by the evidence was stark.
Between 4 p.m. on August 9 and 6:30 a.m. on August 10, Noel was responsible for five institutional counts — the mandated, documented welfare checks on every inmate. She completed zero of them. She signed every count slip anyway, falsely certifying that she had.
The 12 a.m., 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. counts were Noel and Thomas’s joint responsibility. For each, they produced falsified documentation. The control center, trusting those slips, cleared every count.
Beyond the formal counts, SHU policy required officers to walk the tiers every 30 minutes around the clock. Video reviewed by FBI agents covering the entire overnight period showed no such rounds were conducted. Noel nonetheless completed more than 75 individual log entries attesting that rounds had occurred.
“We did not complete the 3am nor 5am rounds.” — Tova Noel, to her supervisor, the morning Epstein was found dead
That quote is from the grand jury presentation, sourced directly from the supervising officer who arrived at the scene after the alarm sounded. Thomas told the same supervisor: “We messed up. I messed up. She’s not to blame. We didn’t do any rounds.”
FBI agents reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from July 23 through August 10, 2019 — the full window of available video. They found that the vast majority of counts throughout the period were conducted normally. Only on this specific shift, the last shift Epstein would ever see, were all five missed in a row.
What They Were Doing Instead
The FBI’s review documented what Noel and Thomas were actually doing during those hours. They were at the officers’ desk. They used the computers. For approximately two hours during the night, neither moved; investigators believed they were asleep.
Noel’s computer searches that evening: furniture sales, benefit websites. Thomas browsed motorcycle listings and checked sports news around 1 a.m., 4 a.m., and 6 a.m.
The overnight supervisor briefly stopped by around 4 a.m. and spoke with them. Another officer passed through at 5:30 a.m. Nobody else entered the SHU, and no one entered the tier where Epstein was housed from 10:30 p.m. until Noel and Thomas went to serve breakfast at 6:30 a.m.
At approximately 6:33 a.m., the alarm went off. Epstein was alone in his cell, unresponsive, with a noose around his neck. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide by hanging.
A New Detail
What the grand jury didn’t have — what has only recently surfaced in the DOJ’s Epstein Library — is Noel’s internet search history from that morning.
According to an FBI forensic review of the SHU computers, Noel searched “latest on Epstein in jail” at 5:42 a.m. She searched it again at 5:52 a.m. At 5:53 a.m. she searched for another inmate. At 6:17 a.m. she searched for “law enforcement discounts.” Epstein was found dead at 6:30 a.m.
In her 2021 sworn statement to the DOJ, Noel was asked about the searches. “Yeah,” she responded, they wouldn’t be “accurate.” She said she didn’t remember doing that and didn’t recall looking him up.
Asked directly who was the last person to see Epstein alive, Noel said: “I would guess me.”
The Money
The DOJ documents also contain a suspicious activity report filed by Chase Bank with the FBI in November 2019. The bank flagged a pattern of cash deposits into Noel’s account beginning in April 2018 — twelve deposits in total.
The largest single deposit was $5,000 on July 30, 2019 — ten days before Epstein’s death. Records available from December 2018 onward show seven deposits totaling $11,880. Noel had only just begun working in the SHU, where Epstein was held, on July 7, 2019.
She was driving a $62,000 2019 Land Rover Range Rover at the time.
Notably: investigators never asked Noel about the deposits during her 2021 DOJ interview. That omission is documented in the files.
“At approximately 10:40 pm, a correctional officer, believed to be Tova Noel, carried linen or inmate clothing up to the L-Tier — the last time any correctional officer approached the only entrance to the SHU tier.” — FBI internal briefing
Epstein was later found hanging with strips of orange cloth. Noel denied carrying linens to his cell and denied seeing him after approximately 10 p.m.
Charges Filed, Then Dropped
In November 2019, Noel and Thomas were indicted on one count of conspiracy and multiple counts of making false statements to federal authorities — charges stemming directly from the falsified count slips and round logs.
The FBI’s bank account investigation found no evidence either guard was bribed. No unusual spending patterns. No suspicious purchases after August 10.
In 2021, both guards entered deferred prosecution agreements. In January 2022, a federal judge dismissed the charges. Both were fired from the Bureau of Prisons. Noel’s attorney, Jason Foy, said at the time that her failures were the result of “inexperience, lack of proper and sufficient training, and being put in a position to fail by the leadership of MCC and the Bureau of Prisons.”
Noel has since been sued in Westchester County Supreme Court over an alleged assault at her current job as a medical office assistant at Montefiore Einstein Advanced Care.
The 4Chan Thread
Somewhere in the early morning hours of August 10, 2019, someone knew.
At 8:16 a.m. — 38 minutes before ABC News reporter Aaron Katersky first tweeted about Epstein’s death — an anonymous user on 4chan posted: “dont ask me how I know, but Epstein died an hour ago from hanging, cardiac arrest. Screencap this.”
The post contained accurate medical details: that Epstein had been intubated, had received fluid infusion, and had been taken to a lower Manhattan emergency room. The poster described the scene with fluency that suggested real-time, first-hand knowledge.
Four days later, the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena to 4chan for IP addresses associated with the post. 4chan complied, providing four IP addresses from two users. Prosecutors subpoenaed AT&T and T-Mobile for subscriber information tied to those addresses.
AT&T replied that it doesn’t maintain records associating dynamic IP addresses with individual accounts. T-Mobile’s response isn’t in the public files. By 2020, prosecutors formally acknowledged to defense attorneys that they had not identified the poster.
The DOJ’s own files note: “The poster used a dynamic IP, and therefore the records obtained did not disclose the author of the post.”
The identity of whoever posted that message before the world knew Epstein was dead has never been established.
Congress Comes Calling
Today — March 13, 2026 — House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent Noel a letter requesting her appearance for a transcribed interview on March 26 at 10 a.m. ET in Washington, D.C.
“Due to public reporting, documents released by the Department of Justice, and documents obtained by the Committee, the Committee believes you have information that will assist in its investigation,” Comer wrote.
The committee has been working through a list of Epstein-adjacent figures for months. Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Bill Barr, former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, and Ghislaine Maxwell have all already been deposed. The panel also recently subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Comer indicated publicly this week that the committee wants to ask Noel about the Google search history and about the bank transactions — specifically the $5,000 cash deposit flagged in the suspicious activity report.
Noel has not publicly responded to the request.
Unanswered
The official record contains no finding of foul play. The medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide. The FBI’s investigation found no evidence the guards were paid to look the other way. The inspector general’s review found systemic failures — non-functioning cameras, absent cellmate, staffing shortages — but no outside actor.
What the record does contain is a pattern of facts that were never fully reconciled in public.
A guard who was on her first weeks in that specific unit. A $5,000 cash deposit ten days before her most important inmate died. More than 75 falsified log entries. Five counts in a row that didn’t happen. Google searches for the man she was supposed to be guarding, conducted 40 minutes before he was found dead. And a question, on record, to which she replied: “I would guess me.”
Congress gets 13 days to prepare its questions. Noel gets 13 days to prepare her answers.
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Sources: United States v. Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, SDNY Grand Jury (November 2019), DOJ Epstein Library Dataset 12 (EFTA02731790–EFTA02731851), DOJ Epstein Library Dataset 9 (EFTA01249647–EFTA01249652), House Oversight Committee letter to Tova Noel (March 13, 2026), NBC News, CNBC, HuffPost, Daily Signal.