by Dylan Howard
They boasted of a star-studded guest list of science icons: Nobel Prize–winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, bestselling author and theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow, MIT professor and artificial intelligence researcher Gerald Jay Sussman, neuroscientist Christof Koch, Nobel Laureate Frances Arnold, Silicon Valley wunderkind Paul Kirkaas, and more.
In the following weeks, Epstein posted interviews with more leading scientists on his new website. Then, in January, the Mindshift conference took place as advertised. Isabel Maxwell attended as Seckel’s guest, along with the other notables.
Isabel’s friend, Laura Goldman, said, “That was in 2010, after the 2008 charges. They obviously forgave him.”
The same month as the conference, Seckel was listed on Epstein’s website among the scientists supposedly funded by the pedophile.
But then something unexpected happened. In March 2011, Seckel and Isabel Maxwell were charged with fraud by a mysterious company called Ensign Consulting. Based in the US Virgin Islands—like so many of Epstein’s businesses—Ensign claimed that Seckel had advised the company on investments, only to run off with more than $500,000 for himself.
Almost at the same time as the lawsuit became public, Seckel’s interview with Epstein was removed from his science website. By the end of the month, the entire website was gone. Days after that, Seckel was in a terrifying car wreck that totaled his Lexus.
Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, Seckel issued a signed “declaration” in May 2011 clarifying his relationship with Epstein.
I have no personal knowledge of Epstein’s private life. Mr. Epstein has not discussed his private life with me and our discussions have been strictly limited to intellectual or philanthropic subjects. . . .
I have never met nor had any discussions with any woman or girl who was under the age of 18 (or previously underaged) who I know to have had intimate or non-intimate contact with Mr. Epstein. . . .
I understand that there has been a subpoena issued to depose me based on alleged ‘credible’ information that I have been in the presence of Mr. Epstein and women or girls under the age of 18. I have not. Nor have I witnessed any sexual behavior or even innuendo by Mr. Epstein. . . .
I further understand that I have been identified as having been in Mr. Epstein’s presence at the same time as famous or “high-profile” people were present. Other than those in the scientific community, I am unaware of any persons in our mutual presence who could be described this way.”
Was there truly an ongoing investigation into Epstein at that time? None ever became public.
More importantly, just who was Al Seckel protecting with that decree? Himself? The answer is not immediately clear.
What is certain, however, is that from there, Seckel’s life took a dramatic turn for the worse. Hounded by the Ensign lawsuit, he and Isabel—now his wife—filed for bankruptcy and fled to France. More messy lawsuits and humiliation followed.
Then in spring 2015, Seckel went hiking in France and vanished.
A massive search ensued, with participants even including those who had attended his conference with Epstein. By June 2015, Seckel’s rental car was found at the side of a cliff. About a month later, his body reportedly was found at the bottom of that same cliff. The cause of death was unclear. Some reports claimed that like Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht and drowned, Seckel’s unfortunate end had been precipitated by a “heart attack.”
A few weeks later, Tablet magazine published an explosive article—written when he was alive—that claimed Seckel had cultivated information-gathering relationships with powerful people in the worlds of science, politics, media, and more. What’s more, the article claimed that Seckel had been actively trying to sell the correspondence and personal files of his father-in-law, Robert Maxwell, a businessman and Mossad spy, in the weeks before his death. Did he take them from Epstein and Ghislaine? In 2004, this team found, Epstein was holding such documents at his Palm Beach home, years before meeting Seckel.
In any case, he’d be found dead before he found a buyer.
Despite the tech luminaries who visited Little St. James, it was never really the hub of Epstein’s scientific pursuits. Instead, Epstein cultivated scientific connections at his 10,000-acre Zorro Ranch, outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In 2010, Epstein donated $25,000 to the nearby Santa Fe Institute, devoted to “the big questions” about science. Already, he was insinuating his way into his new crowd. Over the years, he would donate a quarter of a million dollars to the facility, claiming on his website that he was “actively involved” in the Institute, presumably by way of his donations. The Institute would later insist they had no idea about his background.
In some sense, though, Epstein made Zorro Ranch an institute of his own.
“Our important people were mostly scientists,” Deidre Stratton, the woman tasked with recruiting young massage therapists for Epstein in New Mexico, told Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales. “Jeffrey helped back their research.”
Stratton continued:
He would often have . . . you know, like the guy that won the Nobel Prize for discovering the quark in quantum physics.
A guy that won the Nobel Prize for a DNA discovery, people that help to found Microsoft. Those were the kind of people that were there.
Scientific and brilliant. They would have very erudite conversations over meals. You would pick up a word here and there. Obviously, you couldn’t really hear the whole thing.
They would invite them to lunch and Ghislaine would have this tablet and she would write down the facts that they would tell them. At one point she told me, “Well, you get the information from an expert and then you get rid of them.”
Like Epstein’s other properties, Zorro Ranch was both over the top and disturbing in the details.
Ean Royal lived with his ranch-hand father on the property in the years after Epstein’s Florida prison stint.
“It was super lavish,” Royal said.
He continued:
There was an observatory room that had a telescope. Loads of books. Like a little study, it had a balcony and you could look out through this telescope and kind of look wherever because you had an open sight. This was on the second floor.
There was this huge parlor room. Almost looked like something you’d find in Sherlock Holmes. You’d walk in there. There was this really nice brown desk on one side. You got couches in the middle, and then you got loads of books everywhere. Of course books were all over. It’s totally like a Gatsby thing. All for show. It really looked like there could’ve been a secret room. Like if I pulled one of the books, the shelf would move over or something.
It was mind-blowing. Like, he had a freaking stuffed sheep in the elevator. I would get into the elevator, and you’d be just standing next to this stuffed animal. Like taxidermy. A straight taxidermy animal. Not like a fake. Just in the elevator. Just chilling.
Beautiful furniture. And it just didn’t make sense. Because it’s like, “Man, you have all of this stuff, and no one even uses it. This house is empty 80 percent of the time, and we just come in to maintenance it. We just check it out.” I had that conversation with my dad a lot. I was like, “Why is this here if he doesn’t even use it?’ You have all this vacation ranch and land, and you don’t even use it? That’s insane.”
Even stranger is the fact that hat to this day, the FBI has not raided the property; at least, according to public reports and local witnesses.
“It’s very weird to me that they haven’t, because there’s a vacation ranch out in the middle of freaking nowhere. Like literally nowhere. Like on acres of ranch,” Royal said.
“Acres of land. Why wouldn’t they check it?”
He added:
Especially when they have the multimillion-dollar mansion, and then basically a tiny little town at the base of the ranch with all of these different housings for people to live in, and then housings for vehicles, and then all of the animals there. The front of it is a vacat
ion ranch.
But, why would it just be a vacation ranch? When I was younger, I was always kind of curious. It was like, “So he’s spending all of this money just to run a vacation ranch that he doesn’t even come to?” I’m like, “He has all of these animals, and all of these people that just maintain the ranch.” And it seems like the whole point of it was to just bring people there for some reason, whatever it may be, to be entertained.
Because if he had guests over, like I said, the guests would have entertainment. They would go shooting, they would go horseback riding. But as far as anything outside of that, they couldn’t have just been going to do that. You know what I mean?
They wouldn’t just go to the ranch to shoot some guns and ride horses. Especially if they’re important people. I’m sure what would happen is Epstein was buttering them up, and giving them this as a gift, and then trying to get something out of them or from them, or whatever it may be. Basically, buttering them up before he pitches whatever ideas, or thoughts he might have to do with whatever, which is why governors would end up being there. Politician would end up being there.
According to Stratton, the ranch did feature unique entertainment for its guests.
“I’ll tell you one thing that happened, like every time practically,” Stratton said.
“They had a goat that looked like Merlin, long horns, long hair. It was obviously a male goat, if you know anything about goats.
“Anyway, so they had this little game where they would have the girls or a girl, whomever, they were entertaining down to the stables and the stable lady named Shanna, she would already be sitting on a stool milking the goat. It was staged.
“She he had this little jar with a little milk in it. So then the next thing they would say is, ‘Would you like to try to milk the goat?’ So of course, the girl sat on the stool and Shanna would reach her hands under there to his like ‘udder,’ which was actually his sexual organs and tried to milk him.
“Well, nothing would happen. Then suddenly they’d go, ‘Oh, it’s a male goat!’
“That poor goat. I started feeling badly for the goat.”
Epstein’s employees were required to keep quiet about what they saw and heard on the ranch.
Nancy Sowle, owner of the local general store, told us that the air of secrecy surrounding the ranch was unmistakable—and oppressive.
“Everything was so secretive up there,” Sowle said. “The employees had to sign that they would never disclose any information. It was just all very secretive, and as you found out, you can’t get past the gate and what have you. It bothers me that there are people like that, obviously, but I guess based on everything else that we’ve heard about Epstein and all of these other locations, it’s upsetting. But it’s not surprising, also, that it occurred out here.
“I don’t know,” Sowle continued. “I think maybe people move out here because they think that we’re so far away from the media and other things, so maybe that’s why he decided to build up here.”
Ean Royal remembered: “My dad was super secretive about it, of course, because he was told that was his job. It’s like, ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t say his name.’ All of this stuff.
“I would ask my dad and he was like, ‘I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you his name.’ Then I think at one point he could tell me his first name. So, I learned Jeffrey is Jeffrey.
“I didn’t have any personal connection with Jeffrey, but from what I understand, and how secretive everything was, like if there was a man that had nothing to hide, why was he hiding everything? You know what I mean? I would definitely say that he’s a monster. He was hiding stuff. He was doing a lot of stuff with a lot of important people. But if he’s talking to politicians and people who are in power and actually interacting with them and bringing them to his ranch, he’s got an evil M.O. [modus operandi].”
Epstein’s ultimate goal was—if not evil—certainly unusual. In the early 2000s, he made it clear to several close friends that he had embraced transhumanism, the belief that science and technology would eventually allow humans to evolve beyond the confines of the body.
Indeed, as he said before prison, “Your body can be contained. But not your mind.”
In pursuing that goal, he hoped to use Zorro Ranch as his testing ground.
We have independently corroborated through sources that Epstein planned to deep-freeze his body—specifically his head and penis—so that he could be thawed in the future, supposedly when science had advanced enough for reanimation.
Another aspect of his master plan allegedly included impregnating dozens of women to strengthen the Earth’s gene pool—with his own genes. Scientist Jaron Lanier, who once overheard Epstein prattle on at a dinner party, said Epstein had “based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates.” (Originally named the Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice, the Repository was a sperm bank that operated in Escondido, Calif., from 1980 to 1999. The Repository was commonly believed to have accepted only donations from recipients of the Nobel Prize, although it did accept donations from non-Nobelists, also.)
Of course, Epstein’s big idea was nothing new. The Nazis had called it eugenics.
To Epstein’s former attorney Alan Dershowitz, such talk was commonplace with Epstein, if seriously disturbing. “At one point, at a meeting, he talked about something that sounded too eugenics for most of us,” Dershowitz told our reporter.
“There was a lot of [talk] about how eugenics had been misused in the 1930s, and none of us wanted to have anything to do with anything that sounded eugenic.”
According to Dershowitz, “Mostly he was interested in evolutionary biology that didn’t relate to human beings, related to what Darwin had done and others had done. That’s why he was particularly interested in Stephen Jay Gould.” (Gould died in 2002, long before Epstein’s crimes became public.)
“But he never ever discussed with anybody I know, any of those weird ideas.”
Had he, Dershowitz claimed: “He would have been laughed out of Harvard.”
Perhaps that is why he kept such discussions to carefully selected companions at his New Mexico enclave. To Epstein, acceptance by academics—and by Harvard, most of all—was paramount.
Epstein’s former friend Jesse Kornbluth explained the obsession: “I went to Harvard, and Harvard was extremely meaningful for Jeffrey.
“If you look at pictures of him in later life, he’s wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, he’s giving money to Harvard. He owns an office in Harvard Square, and is palling around with Harvard scientists. Harvard was the kind of validation he sought, and it was validation which I had already acquired.”
As with most things he wanted, Epstein tried first to buy his way into Harvard. University President Lawrence S. Bacow sent an email to students and alumni almost exactly one month after Epstein’s death that laid bare the extent of his contributions:
Our review to date indicates that between 1998 and 2007, Epstein made a number of gifts to support various faculty and institutional research activities across the University. The largest of these was a $6.5 million gift in 2003 to support the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.
The University received other gifts, which totaled approximately $2.4 million, based on current information. Each of these gifts from Epstein and his affiliated foundations to Harvard University predates his guilty plea in June 2008. To date, we have uncovered no gifts received from Epstein or his foundation following his guilty plea.
Moreover, we specifically rejected a gift from Epstein following his conviction in 2008. We have also recently learned that Stephen Kosslyn, a former faculty member and a beneficiary of Epstein’s philanthropy, designated Epstein as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Psychology in 2005. We are seeking to learn more about the nature of that appointment from Dr. Kosslyn, who no longer works at the University.
Epstein’s cash bought him respect on campus. In
June 2003, a writer for The Crimson penned a fawning article about Epstein’s contributions. (Oddly, it would be that freshman author’s last contribution to the paper.)
Noting that Epstein “donated $30 million this year to Harvard for the founding of a mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics program,” the article boasted of his “bevy of eminent friends that includes princes, presidents and Nobel Prize winners.” One such colleague was then-President of Harvard, Lawrence “Larry” Summers: “The two serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations,” the article explained.
Separately, Epstein also was a top donor for Harvard’s Hasty Pudding theater troupe as late as 2018. (The group announced in October 2019 that they would be donating to an anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit following the revelation.)
The nature of Epstein’s role as Visiting Fellow remains murky. He did, however, use his time and vaunted placement at Harvard to cultivate even more important friendships.
One of the leaders of the psychology department in the time that Epstein was there was Stephen Pinker. Popular among students, Pinker was known for his cloud of curly white hair and bestselling books, such as The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works.
In 2007, when Epstein was facing monstrous allegations in Florida, Pinker contributed his professional opinion to a disturbing legal document in the case, one that argued Epstein was not guilty of using the Internet to lure teen victims. Actually, the document implied, any luring had been done in person.
Pinker has said that being categorized as a friend or even coconspirator of Epstein is seriously misguided. In a statement, he called it an “annoying irony” that his association with Epstein would be a black mark on his record, since “I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him and always tried to keep my distance.”
As with most statements of denial regarding Epstein, that last sentence raises an eyebrow. Pinker appears in the flight logs for the “Lolita Express” in 2002, long before Epstein got his official position at Harvard. Even more disturbingly, he was photographed lunching and chatting with Epstein at a 2014 lunch—more than five years after he became a convicted sex felon.