Epstein Data Wiki

Al Seckel

Properties2
tagsperson, correspondence, education-projects, credit-and-lending, online-reputation
aliasesAl seckel, Seckel

22 min read

Name as printed”Al Seckel” in the documents he prepared; “Al seckel” in the From: field of his email as this release renders it12
How he described himself”formerly of the California Institute of Technology,” in the management-team page of his own funding proposal3
Documents cited hereMay 4, 2010 to December 8, 2010
Invoiced$25,000 to Enhanced Education, at Epstein’s instruction, for coordinating a science conference45
ProposedA “Thinking Skills Project,” costed at $50,000 for three months’ work, sent to Epstein on November 23, 2010136
Asked forAbout $30,000 in May 2010; then, on December 7, 2010, terms on a one-year loan of $3.5m, and then on “8 million in secured credit”728
Whose account he acted forThe wire sheet attached to the May 2010 invoice names IllusionWorks, L.L.C. as the account holder9; for the November proposal and the December credit request, no document opened for this page names a principal

Al Seckel wrote to Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly during 2010. The documents in this release record four things he did: he issued an invoice for $25,000 to “Enhanced Education,” on Epstein’s own written instruction; he ran a search-engine and content operation intended to change what Google returned for Epstein’s name; he put a costed educational funding proposal in front of Epstein with a named management team and a letter of support on university letterhead; and, on a single afternoon in December, he asked Epstein for terms on a multi-million-dollar secured loan and described the collateral he had in mind.

A separate body of Seckel material is set out on Isabel Maxwell and is not repeated here: correspondence about a World Economic Forum wire, an invitation to an event in Malibu, Epstein’s question about Seckel’s academic credentials, the civil fraud action Ensign Consulting Ltd. v. Seckel et al., and a painting he was trying to sell.

Nothing on this page is a finding of wrongdoing.

What the documents state about whom he was acting for

The desk had a standing note treating Enhanced Education, the trade name of Epstein’s Virgin Islands foundation, as the likely home of Seckel’s educational project. The documents do not support that, and they do support a different and narrower link.

On the project: the covering email of November 23, 2010 that carried the proposal was addressed to Jeffrey Epstein personally, with one further addressee on the copy line whose display name and address are both withheld by the producing party.1 The follow-up of December 7, 2010 asks Epstein to “pass it along” and offers “anything else that they may need to evaluate our proposal.”10 Who “they” are is not stated. No document opened for this page names Enhanced Education, the J. Epstein Virgin Islands Foundation, or any other institution as the body evaluating or funding the Thinking Skills Project. Searches of the corpus for “Seckel” together with “Enhanced Education” returned five pages, all of them the May 2010 invoice run described below; “Seckel” with “Virgin Islands Foundation” returned nothing; “Thinking Skills Project” as a phrase returned two pages, the Singularity University letter and the December 7 follow-up.

On the invoice: the link between Seckel and Enhanced Education is documented, dated, and unconnected to the thinking-skills project. It is a coordination fee for a science conference, six months earlier.

Seckel’s own description of his position, in the management-team page of the proposal he wrote, is “formerly of the California Institute of Technology.”3 No document opened for this page states an employer or a principal for whom he was acting when he sent the proposal or when he asked about credit. This page does not supply one.

May 2010: the Enhanced Education invoice

On May 19, 2010, at 14:46:57 UTC, Epstein wrote to Seckel, copying his accountant Rich Kahn: “al, please send enhanced education , an invoice for 25 k, that represents your coordination fee, for the science syposium .. email to rich.”4 Fifteen minutes later Seckel replied to the same chain, attaching two Microsoft Word documents: “Dear Rich, As per Jeff’s request, please find attached invoice and wiring instructions. They are Microsoft word docs, and so, if the address, etc. needs any modification, please correct.”11

The invoice is in the release as a two-sheet document.59 Sheet 1 is headed “Invoice” and bills “Enhanced Education / Palm Beach Florida.” The single line item reads “Coordination fee for setting up science conference, / Arranging speakers, demonstrations, exhibits, venue,” with a total of 25,000. The table above it carries one data row, giving 19 May 2010 in the date cell, Rich under “Ordered By,” Seckel under “Sales Rep.” and Immediate under “Terms.” The billing address the invoice gives is Palm Beach, Florida; the entity page records Enhanced Education as a registered trade name of the J. Epstein Virgin Islands Foundation, whose own filings give a St. Thomas address. Two things on the sheet do not agree with the rest of it, and both were read at the image at 600 dpi: the “Invoice Date” field reads 19 July 2010, two months after the date in the table below it and the date of the email that produced it; and the totals block carries “Subtotal $25000,” “Shipping $20000,” and “Balance Due $25000,” so that the shipping figure is stated but is not carried into the balance.5

Sheet 2 is headed “Invoice — Wire Transfer Info.” It gives an invoice date of 19 May 2010, a Customer ID of “Enhanced Education,” and wire instructions naming the account holder as IllusionWorks, L.L.C. at Bank of America.9 Account and routing numbers on this page are not reproduced here. Contact-detail fields in the letterhead of both sheets are not reproduced here, and neither is the letterhead street address.

The corpus was searched for a record of payment against this invoice, on “Seckel” with “wire,” with “25,000,” and with “invoice,” and no bank record, remittance or confirmation of payment on it was found among the pages returned. The invoice records what was billed; it does not record that anything was paid.

May 2010: an earlier request for cash

Two weeks before the invoice, on May 4, 2010, Epstein wrote to Seckel first: “why don’t you pawn your newton painting.. get 100k for four to six months.. if you sell it or get your deal done you’d be ok.”7 Seckel replied that the painting could not be pawned, that he had “assets, but as I said to you, it is an immediate and bad liquidity problem for the next two-three months, and I am actively trying to generate some necessary funds,” and asked: “Is there someway I could make this work for you, in terms of either a payment for a sculpture, support for my work, or a interest bearing loan? Looking for about $30K and repayment in 3 months or before.”7 Epstein answered, at 14:51:41 UTC the same day: “why not have somone lend you money with the painting as collateral, if it is worth anywhere near you estimate , it should be no problem to raise funds against it.”7

The painting itself, Epstein’s later remarks about Seckel’s attempts to sell it, and the litigation in which it features are covered on Isabel Maxwell.

October 2010: work on what a search engine returned for Epstein’s name

On October 17, 2010, at 12:34:05 UTC, Seckel wrote to Epstein under the subject “Your voice,” asking him to record himself talking for “at least ten to 15 minutes” on each of fourteen listed subjects, the first “Fundamental and Theoretical Physics” and the last “Astronomy,” with “Thinking Skills, Creativity, and Innovation” thirteenth, so that the recordings could be “transcribed and edit[ed] and post[ed]” as blogs: “need to get some of this in your own voice, which obviously I can’t or others write.”12

Lower in the same chain, Seckel set out what the work was for. Writing to Epstein earlier that day, he said: “The purpose of this is for the search engines, which means, I made it deliberately long, I broke up your questions repeatedly, and repeated your name over and over in a way that wasn’t obvious for what we were trying to accomplish. The fastest first path is the one we are taking. I used my interview first, because I could control it, and I could write it easily, and it had real content, not pseudo-content, and get it up by today.” He added: “I have my teams actually pulling all nighters. I haven’t slept for 48 hours working non-stop on this. So, please Jeff, we are all pulling for you very hard. Myself especially… I don’t make a single penny on this.”13

The release holds a document answering that description: twenty-one pages headed “A Passionate Discussion with Al Seckel,” laid out as a question-and-answer session in which the questions are attributed to “Epstein” and the answers to “Seckel.”14 The page does not assert that this is the same file Seckel refers to. If it is, then on Seckel’s own account of how he wrote it, the questions attributed to Epstein were composed by Seckel and the length and repetition were chosen for a search engine rather than for a reader.

In the middle of the October 17 chain Seckel forwarded, without naming its author, a message he said came from “my other team leader, who is the leading expert in this area.” The desk does not identify that correspondent; the producing party did not name them and no name is printed on the sheet. That forwarded message describes, in its author’s words, building “jeffreyepsteinforbes.com, jeffreyepsteinvanityfair.com, jeffreyepsteindeposition.com, jeffreyepsteindailybeast.com sites which will give a positive spin on these news articles,” a plan to be “pimping the ‘other’ Jeffrey Epsteins that already exist on the web, trying to jump them up in rankings,” a charity site at JeffreyEpstein.org, backend work being done in the Philippines, and this: “We are continuing trying to tweak the Wikipedia process. He has over twenty people with google alerts on him, who go and undo our edits every time we remove material. We will have to take some more extreme measures, but this will be easier with links once the other sites are up and functional.”15 Those are the forwarded author’s words. What is Seckel’s own act, on the face of the chain, is that he forwarded them to Epstein as an account of “how much is involved.”

This work predates by some eighteen months the retainer of Reputation Changer, LLC, the Pennsylvania firm that pitched Epstein a priced plan to suppress search results for his name in April and October 2012 and was paid to run it.

November–December 2010: the Thinking Skills Project proposal

On November 23, 2010, at 16:51:03 UTC, Seckel sent Epstein an email whose subject line was itself the pitch: “Please consider this educational funding proposal carefully, and let’s discuss. This is entirely separate from what we have been doing, and is quite revolutionary and important.” The body reads in full: “Jeff, Please take the time to carefully review the enclosed documents, in order of listing below. I hope that they will resonate with you. Al.” Three attachments are listed in the header: SCOPE_OF_WORKThinkingskills.docx, ThinkingSkills.pdf and NJSU_Recommendation.docx.1

The scope of work is in the release. Its stated goal is “the substantive groundwork for a working ‘proof of concept’ innovative interactive website dedicated to teaching young adults necessary thinking skills that can be incorporated into a standardized school curriculum,” with “a formal business plan that will allow for the raising of additional capital to complete the site.” It sets out five sections (Perception, Propaganda or critical thinking, Context, Scientific Method, and Creativity and Innovation), a three-month timeline, and, on the following sheet, “Cost of proposal: $50,000.”163

The management team named on that sheet and the next is Al Seckel, Caprice Young and Neil Jacobstein.317 The same run carries a letter on Singularity University letterhead, dated November 23, 2010 and addressed to “Al Seckel / Caprice Young / Thinking Skills Project,” which offers the university’s Graduate Studies Program “as a beta test site for the successive iterations of the project” and the writer’s service “in an informal advisory role to the technical project, on a pro bono basis.” The letter is signed in ink above the printed lines “Neil Jacobstein / President, Singularity University at NASA Ames.”6

Two weeks later, on December 7, 2010, Seckel wrote again under the subject “Educational thinking skills project”: “We have added an important new module to our proposal, but it does not effect our budget. Please pass it along. Thanks! Also, if there is anything else that they may need to evaluate our proposal.” Beneath the signature the email carries the added module in full, headed “Module: Numerology,” a page on innumeracy and statistics with nine listed areas from “Overcoming Math Anxiety” to “Polling.”10 The header of that email carries no redaction bars: the To: field names Epstein in the clear and the From: field prints “Al seckel” with no address alongside it.

December 7, 2010: the credit exchange

About five hours after the module email, and on the same day, Seckel opened a separate exchange with Epstein under the subject “Question.” The whole of it is dated, and the release carries each message both as a standalone document with a full Date: header in UTC and as quoted text inside the later messages.

At 18:35:41 UTC Seckel wrote to Epstein. The To: field names “Jeffrey Epstein” in the clear; Seckel’s own address in the From: field is barred.

Serious question for an opportunity: For a 3.5 mil loan for one year… How much actual and real secured collateral would you need (amount of value)? What would be your loan rate? Is this possible? This is actually a real question.2

At 18:38:26 UTC, two minutes and forty-five seconds later, Epstein replied with two words: “6 million.”18

At 18:39:23 UTC Seckel came back: “Can we make it 8 million in secured credit? Just easier. What would be your loan rate?”8

At 18:52:54 UTC Epstein asked: “What collateral is the issue.”19

At 18:55:52 UTC Seckel answered:

Professionally appraised material that you take possession of, but it can not leave France. National Treasure stuff. Appraised between 8 and 10 mil. several years ago. Gifts of Queen Elizabeth and Henri Navarre, and so heritage stuff, and so, can’t leave country.

You would have to put it in either a Paris Vault or your Paris apartment.20

The counterparty on this exchange is Jeffrey Epstein, established from the header fields rather than from the body: the To: line of the opening message prints “Jeffrey Epstein” and his address in the clear, and the reply that follows carries his account in the From: line, also in the clear.218 Seckel’s own email address is barred wherever it is printed on the five sheets of this exchange, and barred again in the quoted headers reproduced inside the later messages; in the second production the From: line carries a display name and no address at all.

What the phrase “8 million in secured credit” means on its face is not settled by the document. Read one way it raises the facility from the $3.5m first asked for; read another it responds to Epstein’s “6 million” by offering more collateral. The documents record the words and not the intention. The corpus was searched for a continuation of this exchange, on “8 million in secured credit,” on “secured credit,” on “loan rate,” and on “Seckel” with “loan rate”: no rate quoted, no amount agreed and no instrument was found among the pages returned. Two further messages from Epstein of the same evening, sent under a changed subject line and carrying the earlier messages of this exchange beneath them as quoted text, are among those pages; neither states a rate or records an agreement.2122

December 8, 2010: the island conference

The next day Seckel sent Epstein a programme under the subject “Island conference”: two days, three talks or discussions each morning and afternoon, covering “theoretical physics, complexity, ai, new financing models, evolutionary genetics, consciousness/free will, thinking skills, hacking approach to problem solving in biology, technology, encryption, new minimally invasive surgical techniques,” and closing “Does this work for you?”23 Epstein replied at 13:22:15 UTC: “I think we should schedule a walk or hike , , i also woudl like a more detailed list of who talks when..”24

Times and time zones

Every clock time on this page is UTC, taken from an RFC Date: header that prints its own offset as +0000. Where a message survives only in the second production, whose header block gives an unlabelled Sent: field at the top of the message, that field has been checked against a copy of the same message carrying a real Date: header: the December 7 message at Sent: Tue 12/7/2010 6:39:23 PM is the same message as the one dated Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:39:23 +0000, and the message at Sent: Tue 12/7/2010 6:55:52 PM is the one dated 18:55:52 +0000.2582026 In this export the unlabelled top-of-message Sent: field is UTC. The Sent: lines inside the quoted header blocks lower down the same sheets are not: on the sheet cited at 8 a quoted block gives Sent: Tue, December 7, 2010 10:38:26 AM for the message whose own header reads 18:38:26 +0000, eight hours behind, Pacific standard time.

The local times quoted inside these messages are not. On a single sheet of the May 19 chain, the Sent: line of a quoted message renders as 7:46:57 AM for a message the header dates 14:46:57 UTC, seven hours behind, Pacific daylight time, while the “On Wed, May 19, 2010 at …” lines generated by the other correspondent’s client on the same sheet run four hours behind, Eastern.11 A reader taking either at face value would misorder the exchange.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, “Please consider this educational funding proposal carefully, and let’s discuss. This is entirely separate from what we have been doing, and is quite revolutionary and important.”, Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:51:03 +0000, attachments SCOPE_OF_WORKThinkingskills.docx; ThinkingSkills.pdf; NJSU_Recommendation.docx. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00744757 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:07Z. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, “Question,” Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:35:41 +0000. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00709227 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:01Z. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Same document, p.2: “Cost of proposal: $50,000,” and the management-team entries for Al Seckel and the opening of the entry for Caprice Young. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00744758 p.2 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:07Z. The extraction of this sheet renders one name as “Arianna Harrington”; the sheet reads “Arianna Huffington.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  4. Jeffrey Epstein to Al Seckel, copy to Rich Kahn, “Re: Will you be free in the next hour? I am heading up to SF this morning.”, Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 14:46:57 +0000. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00734529 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:02Z. ↩ ↩2

  5. Invoice, sheet 1 of 2, billed to “Enhanced Education / Palm Beach Florida,” total 25,000. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00731043 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:03Z, and re-read at 600 dpi for the date and totals block at 2026-09-10T04:06Z, and again at 600 dpi for the table row by the fix at 2026-09-10T04:43Z. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Letter on Singularity University letterhead, November 23, 2010, to “Al Seckel / Caprice Young / Thinking Skills Project,” signed in ink above the printed lines “Neil Jacobstein / President, Singularity University at NASA Ames.” https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00744762 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:07Z, and re-read at the image by the fix at 2026-09-10T04:42Z. The project is named on this sheet twice, both times in the clear: in the address block quoted above, and again in the first sentence of the body, which opens by calling it the addressees’ own project. ↩ ↩2

  7. Chain of May 4, 2010 between Jeffrey Epstein and Al Seckel; the top message is Epstein’s, Date: Tue, 04 May 2010 14:51:41 +0000, and the chain below carries Seckel’s reply and Epstein’s earlier opening message. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00733636 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:05Z. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  8. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, “Re: Question,” Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:39:23 +0000, body “Can we make it 8 million in secured credit? Just easier. What would be your loan rate?” https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00704657 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:01Z. The same message appears as the top message of https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02032252 p.1, at Sent: Tue 12/7/2010 6:39:23 PM — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:00Z. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  9. Invoice, sheet 2 of 2, “Invoice — Wire Transfer Info.”, Customer ID “Enhanced Education”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00731044 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:05Z. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  10. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, “Educational thinking skills project,” Sent: Tue 12/7/2010 1:23:45 PM (unlabelled field; UTC in this export, see the note on time zones above). https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01994763 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:00Z. ↩ ↩2

  11. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, copy to Rich Kahn, same subject, Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 15:01:59 +0000, attachments enhanced1.doc; enhanced2.doc. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00758789 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:04Z. ↩ ↩2

  12. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, “Your voice,” Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2010 12:34:05 +0000. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00754420 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:08Z, and re-read at the image for the list of subjects by the fix at 2026-09-10T04:42Z. ↩

  13. Same chain, p.3: Seckel to Epstein, quoted at “On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 6:41 AM.” https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00754420 p.3 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:09Z. ↩

  14. “A Passionate Discussion with Al Seckel,” 21 pages, question-and-answer format with speakers labelled “Epstein” and “Seckel.” https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00724612 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:09Z. The passage in which Seckel describes being “partially funded” with Caprice Young to build a thinking-skills website is at p.5, read at the image at the same time. ↩

  15. Same chain, p.2: Seckel’s message of the same day forwarding, without naming its author, a message he attributes to “my other team leader, who is the leading expert in this area.” https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00754420 p.2 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:08Z. ↩

  16. “SCOPE OF WORK,” goal, sections, and three-month timeline. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00744758 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:07Z. ↩

  17. Same document, p.3: the remainder of the management-team entry for Caprice Young and the entry for Neil Jacobstein, which opens “Neil Jacobstein is the first President of Singularity University.” https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00744758 p.3 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:20Z. One item in a list of organisations on this sheet is blacked out on the image; the text layer of the same sheet prints the list with no gap, so a reader working from the extraction alone would not know an entry had been withheld. ↩

  18. Jeffrey Epstein to Al Seckel, “Re: Question,” Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:38:26 +0000, body “6 million”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00709228 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:01Z. ↩ ↩2

  19. Jeffrey Epstein to Al Seckel, “Re: Question,” Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:52:54 +0000, body “What collateral is the issue”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00709232 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:01Z. ↩

  20. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, “Re: Question,” Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:55:52 +0000, describing the proposed collateral. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00709233 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:02Z. ↩ ↩2

  21. Jeffrey Epstein to Al Seckel, “Re: When can you speak?”, Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:04:16 +0000, body “6 western”, carrying beneath it, as quoted text under its own header block, the “Question” exchange up to and including the message of 18:52:54 UTC; Seckel’s reply of 18:55:52 UTC does not appear in it. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00709237 p.1 — read at the image by the gate at 2026-09-10T04:31Z. ↩

  22. Jeffrey Epstein to Al Seckel, “Re: When can you speak?”, Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:52:03 +0000, body “Send phone number”, again carrying the same quoted chain beneath it. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00709239 p.1 — read at the image by the gate at 2026-09-10T04:31Z. ↩

  23. Al Seckel to Jeffrey Epstein, “Island conference,” Sent: Wed 12/8/2010 9:25:35 AM (unlabelled top-of-message field; UTC in this export, see the note on time zones above). https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02017521 p.1 — read at the image by the gate at 2026-09-10T04:27Z. The identical text is also quoted in full inside the copy read at the image at 24. ↩

  24. Jeffrey Epstein to Al Seckel, “Re: Island conference,” Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:22:15 +0000, quoting Seckel’s programme in full. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00899213 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:11Z. ↩ ↩2

  25. The same opening message quoted inside a later copy of the chain. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02032252 p.1 — read at the image by the writer at 2026-09-10T04:00Z. ↩

  26. A second copy of the same message in the other production, at Sent: Tue 12/7/2010 6:55:52 PM. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02034541 p.1 — read at the image by the gate at 2026-09-10T04:27Z. It is used on this page only to show that the unlabelled top-of-message Sent: field matches the UTC Date: header of the copy read at the image at 20; every word quoted from this message is taken from that copy. ↩

Backlinks