(ZeroHedge)—The longtime butler of Jeffrey Epstein is speaking out about the death of the deceased pedophile and disgraced financier, joining the chorus of voices expressing disbelief that he committed suicide.
Valdson Vieira Cotrin, who oversaw Epstein’s residence in Paris for 18 years, made the admission in an interview with The Telegraph.
“I am like his brother [Mark Epstein]. I don’t believe this was suicide. He loved life too much,” Cotrin told the British newspaper.
Cotrin described his final encounter with Epstein, painting a picture of a man who appeared far from suicidal. Epstein was relaxed and discussing future plans, including additional investments in his islands, having discreetly purchased a second property that Cotrin had visited, and spending more time in Paris.
“I drove him to Le Bourget airport. It was a Saturday, because on Monday he was supposed to appear before the judge regarding all these accusations,” the longtime servant said.
The gravity of the situation became clear shortly after Epstein’s departure, according to Cotrin. “When I got home, two young women rang, his main girlfriend who had been with him officially for several years, Karyna [Shuliak] and another who worked for him. And then they told me, ‘Mr Epstein has gone to prison. He arrived in New York. The police were waiting for him’.”
Cotrin also claimed that he worked dozens of times at Epstein’s properties in New York, Palm Beach, Florida and on Little St James, Epstein’s private Caribbean island, dubbed by the media as “pedophile island,” where he is said to have trapped and raped often underage victims.
“He trusted me completely,” said Cotrin, who has not worked since his boss’s death six years ago, adding that he never saw Epstein commit any sex crimes.
“I was his chauffeur, his cook, his housekeeper. I did everything in Paris, I was his only full-time, paid-up employee and worked for him from 2001 until his death. If someone could have seen something, it’s Valdson, there’s no one else,” he said.
Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019, at 6:30 a.m., hanging from his bed. The shadowy investor was pronounced dead at New York Downtown Hospital at 6:39 a.m. The Department of Justice and the New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide by hanging.
However, Mark Epstein, the brother of Jeffrey Epstein, has consistently rejected the government’s conclusion and repeatedly stated that he does not believe his brother took his own life.
“I believe he was killed because I believe that, a day after he died, and I heard on CNN that he was found dead from assumed suicide,” Mark Epstein said. “They came out of the autopsy and they both concurred that this looked more like a homicide than a suicide.”
The autopsy findings have become a key source of dispute. Epstein’s autopsy was performed by New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson and a pathologist hired by the Epstein family, Dr. Michael Baden.
Mark Epstein has pointed to specific forensic evidence that he believes contradicts the suicide ruling.
“One of the major things was the three broken bones in his neck. Now, Dr. Baden has done about 500 autopsies. He’s been doing this for over 50 years. And I’ve spoken to other pathologists and they say, you know, on a soft hanging. Which is supposedly what Jeffrey was supposed to have done. You know, you might get a broken bone, maybe two, but no one’s ever seen three broken bones in this kind of hanging,” Mark Epstein said.
Earlier July, the joint DOJ-FBI memo declared an “exhaustive review” of evidence from Epstein’s death definitively ruled out murder.
The agencies also denied the existence of a “client list” tied to Epstein, directly contradicting earlier remarks by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi had previously suggested on Fox News that such a list was “sitting on my desk” for review, igniting speculation about Epstein’s possible blackmailing of globalist elites.
Trump has repeatedly sought to dismiss the scandal, accusing Democrats of fabricating a hoax around Epstein to thwart his agenda.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
