None of this mattered to Epstein, who recurrently expressed his interest in race science beyond this 2016 correspondence. The tranche of Epstein files also shows that in 2018, he repeatedly tried to get in contact with Charles Murray, a political scientist whose 1994 book, The Bell Curve, is one of the best-known texts to posit a relationship between intelligence and race. Epstein didn’t specify why he was trying to connect with Murray, but he claimed that they had met previously. (Murray told me over email that he had never received an email from Epstein and that it was possible that they’d met in passing at a conference reception at some point. If this ever happened, though, Murray had no memory of it, he said.)