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 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 on July 23, 2019, with a strip of bedsheet around his neck.
"They investigated me for month - found nothing!!! So 15 year old charges resulted," said the short note, which is hard to decipher in some places.
"It is a treat to be able to choose" the "time to say goodbye," the note continues. "Watcha want me to do - Bust out cryin!!"
"NO FUN," it concludes, with those words underlined. "NOT WORTH IT!!"
Epstein's name is not mentioned in the note, which is not signed.
Officials said they found a handwritten note in Epstein's cell at the time of his death, but that it didn't appear to be a suicide note. Rather, they said, it appeared to be a list of grievances about conditions at the jail, including about food, showers and the presence of bugs.
Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre, a federal jail in Manhattan, on August 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The medical examiner ruled it a suicide and authorities have pointed to a series of missteps by jail personnel - including browsing the internet and sleeping when they should've been checking on Epstein - for allowing him to take his own life.
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