by molecular biologist J. Craig Venter, with the stated aim of keeping the critical resource available to scholars by housing it at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Lawsuits and disputes Seckel was sued on several occasions after disputes over rare-book investment and sales. In a San Diego Reader article from 1994, Tom McIver (author of Anti-Evolution: An Annotated Bibliography) accused Seckel of failing to disclose financial information as leader of the Southern California Skeptics and misrepresenting his academic credentials. Seckel later sued McIver for libel over edits to his Wikipedia page. The suit was settled in 2007 under undisclosed terms. A 2015 profile of Seckel in Tablet Magazine by Mark Oppenheimer detailed several first-person accounts from individuals who reported that Seckel still owed them money including the widow of one of his mentors, his lawyer, a graduate student, and those who had engaged in rare book deals. The article stated that there were at least 25 cases involving Seckel from 1992 to 2015 in the Los Angeles Superior Court database. Oppenheimer reported that Seckel cultivated a false image, both with personal contacts and within the media, of himself as a graduate from Cornell with degrees in physics and math, as an affiliate of and candidate for doctoral degrees at Caltech, and as a scientist conducting research in conjunction with colleagues at Harvard University. Some of these inaccuracies were published in media coverage of Seckel, including in the Los Angeles Times in 1985 and 1987. Seckel was later accused of absconding with over $500,000. Collaboration with Jeffrey Epstein In 2009, Seckel was involved in organizing a science conference with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Mindshift conference took place in early 2011 on Epstein's private island Little Saint James. In attendance were scientists Murray Gell-Mann, Leonard Mlodinow, Gerald Sussman, and Frances Arnold, in addition to the actor and cryptocurrency proponent Brock Pierce. An interview between Jeffrey Epstein and Al Seckel discussing perception appeared on Epstein's science website on October 17, 2010. Personal life Seckel married Laura Mullen in 1980; their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1987. Mullen and Seckel later divorced. His second marriage was to Denice D. Lewis in 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada: it was never annulled. Seckel married for a third time to Alice Klarke; the union was dissolved in 2007. Seckel became involved with Isabel Maxwell from 2007 until his death in France in 2015.