Jeffrey Epstein’s brother insists in a new interview that the financier’s shocking death behind bars was no suicide — and maintains that the convicted pedophile was “innocent” of new sex-trafficking charges against him.

“I could see if he got a life sentence, I could then see him taking himself out,” Mark Epstein, 65, told the Miami Herald of his late older brother. “But he had a bail hearing coming up.”

Jeffrey Epstein, 66, was found dead of what authorities have ruled a hanging inside his cell at Lower Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in August.

The deep-pocketed hedge-funder — who in 2008 copped a sweetheart plea deal in Florida for soliciting an underage girl for sex — had been arrested the month prior in New York in a massive new trafficking case.

“He was innocent and, until proven guilty, you are entitled to bail in America,” Mark Epstein told the Herald. “He had a bail hearing in two days. … He was the most recognizable person on the planet. Where is he going to run and hide?”

Claiming that his brother was looking forward to his release — and revealing that “he was going to hire armed guards to keep an eye on him at his own expense” — Epstein maintained that his brother didn’t kill himself, and hinted that he was killed to keep him quiet.

“Jeffrey knew a lot of stuff about a lot of people,” he cryptically told the paper, declining to elaborate, but echoing a popular conspiracy theory that his brother was murdered.

Despite Jeffrey’s prior conviction, and the new charges against him, Mark Epstein defended his brother as someone whose taste in women approached the line, but didn’t stray over it.

“Do I think that it was inappropriate for him, at age 50 or 60, to be with women who were 18 or 20?” asked Epstein, who lives in New York. “Yes, but it certainly wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t sex-trafficking.”