I don't know anyone who doesn't believe he was killed. It's a narrative of the popular culture. eg Clinton's bj in the whitehouse or Xi Ping disappearing people or any organization that does an internal audit to find no wrongdoing.
It is fundamental to this discussion that the narrative you describe is fringe (credible polling puts it at around 30% uptake) and directly contradicted by both the evidence and conclusions reached by the institutions required to evaluate said evidence (DOJ, FBI).
It is a narrative in the same way as flat earthism or QAnon are narratives. We should be careful to not imply equivalence ("both sides"-ing) to the situation: there is reality, and then there is a group of people who either do not possess the facts (many people in this thread, for example), or are unfortunately not capable of grasping them for whatever reason.
> Clinton's BJ was in popular culture before the conviction.
Clinton was credibly and publicly accused by an individual, and had a long history of such accusations.
> Pointing to a legal case is moving the goalpost.
My point is that there is no equivalence between Clinton and Epstein, but I don't think you were drawing any really, you were just saying (I think?) that they were both narratives that took hold prior to the facts being established and conclusions reached.
> It is not and does not.
Just sit down and try to write the narrative of what happened and you might see what I mean:
1. Was it the guards, or a professional assassin?
2. If guards: how were they identified? Who put them on the right shift at the right time? Who else helped? How did the benefactor of the scheme know that the guards wouldn't grass on the approach? How did the benefactor of the scheme find the guards and approach them? When the guards walked into the room, how did they restrain Epstein without injuring him or leaving behind any DNA evidence? Did they tie the bedsheets together before or after the murder? How would they be remunerated given the scrutiny on them and their associates from the FBI? Why would they admit to falsifying logs and draw more attention to themselves rather than engineering an excuse less likely to draw huge scrutiny?
3. If professional assassin: how did they get in without being seen on the security cameras monitoring the single point of entrance/egress from Epstein's block? How did they get into the prison through multiple layers of security? Were the guards also paid off? How did the assassin restrain him without injuring him or themselves? Why would you go to the trouble of infiltrating a prison - which is after all an axiomatically hard thing to do – when the guy had already tried to hang himself weeks earlier?
4. General: why do you discount the conclusions of the DOJ psychologist who reviewed Epstein's prison records and evaluations and concluded that it was suicide? Why would a shadowy figure trying to kill Epstein not simply pressure him from the outside by threatening his family (given that they apparently have the capacity to infiltrate a prison facility utterly unnoticed)? Why would you conclude that Epstein's first suicide attempt was sincere but his second was not? Why would you leave it until after he was suicidal and by all accounts uncooperative with the authorities to kill him rather than killing him at a time when it was both easier to achieve and less clear that he would not cooperate? Why do you think the FBI found no cause for suspicion in the testimony of the guards, if you think they did it or were in the loop?
People who spout conspiratorial nonsense with conviction and a poor grasp of the facts / ability to reason are the very reason conspiracy theories propagate. You might be a brilliant mind in other areas, but you should know that to the 70% of the population who do not believe that Epstein was murdered, you are in broadly the same bucket as someone who believes they saw Elvis alive in Hawaii a few weeks ago.
