Question

Please don’t confuse my question with determining the key press. I don’t want the user to press any key. On the contrary, I want to run a script which fires the Escape key press event.

Answer 1

You can use $.Event() to create an Event object containing a keydown event with the keyCode of 27 (which should be Esc) like:

var esc = $.Event("keydown", { keyCode: 27 });
$("body").trigger(esc); // change body to the element where you'd like to execute the escape key press.

See this working demo and the docs at jquery.com

Also note that, as stated by Christofer, this might not be working in all browsers and environments as it might be considered shady behavior that could be used in a malicious manner – just like triggering a click event on an <a> with an external href will not happen. I successfully tested this (the Esc) in Chrome, Safari, Opera, FF & IE9 though.