PALM BEACH PETE

Peter Simel is Peter Simel. The claim his drive revived is about another man, and it comes in versions that cannot all be true together. Each is set out here with where it started and what the record says back.

He did not die in 2019

This one is as old as the death. Three days after Epstein was found, FactCheck.org was already answering a Facebook post that read "Not a chance he is dead" and had been shared thousands of times. The post rested on one New York Post photograph of Epstein on a gurney outside New York Downtown Hospital, and on two observations about it: the body was not covered, and the skin looked pink ^[1]. The 2026 version traded the gurney for a convertible. Against it stand the Bureau of Prisons statement of August 10, 2019, that he was found unresponsive in his cell at about 6:30 that morning and pronounced dead at the hospital, statements the same day from the attorney general and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, an autopsy by the city's chief medical examiner, and her ruling of August 16: cause of death hanging, manner of death suicide ^[1].

He died, and it was not suicide

This is the version with a credentialed dissenter. Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner hired by Epstein's brother to watch the autopsy, said on television in October 2019 that the fractures in the neck were more consistent with homicidal strangulation than with hanging ^[3]. The medical examiner stood by her ruling. In June 2023 the Justice Department's inspector general published what the jail's own staff had done that night, and called it "numerous and serious failures": the officers on his unit had skipped their rounds and falsified the logs, and he had been left without a cellmate. The same report records that the FBI investigated the death and found no criminality in it ^[2]. A two-page memo from the department and the FBI in July 2025 said the same, and added that enhanced footage showed nobody entering the area where he was held ^[4]. Whoever believes this version needs Epstein dead, which rules out the man on I-95.

The jail video was altered

The July 2025 memo came with hours of footage from the jail, and viewers found that its clock jumps from 11:58 p.m. to midnight. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Bureau of Prisons had told her the system resets every night, so the same minute is missing every night ^[5]. Within days WIRED and outside forensic analysts read the file's metadata. The video published as raw had been assembled from at least two clips in Adobe Premiere Pro and saved at least four times in a 23-minute session on May 23, 2025, and one of the source clips ran nearly three minutes longer than what was released. The same analysts said the metadata cannot show what was changed and does not prove anyone meant to deceive ^[6]. In those reports the department had not explained the edit.

The man in the convertible is the proof

Of the four, only this one is about Simel, and it is the only one he can answer himself. He has, on camera, more than once. It asks for a man who faked his death in federal custody and then drove with the top down through Palm Beach County, where he was first arrested in 2006. It also has to get past the ears ^[7].