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Ex-Journalist Charged With Making Bomb Threats to Multiple JCCs To Plead Guilty to Cyberstalking, Says Prosecutor

Juan Thompson will appear in a Manhattan courtroom next Monday

by
Jonathan Zalman
June 07, 2017
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers search the JCC of Southern Nevada, February 27, 2017.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers search the JCC of Southern Nevada, February 27, 2017.Ethan Miller/Getty Images

In March, Juan Thompson, a 32-year-old former journalist for The Intercept, was arrested in connection to a number of bomb threats targeting the ADL and JCCs around the United States. These scares—which occurred amid a wider and apparently unconnected string of JCC bomb threats and acts of anti-Semitism—were allegedly part of a convoluted “campaign of harassment” that Thompson, a St. Louis native, was executing toward an ex-girlfriend.

A letter filed by prosecutors on Tuesday in Manhattan states that Thompson intends to plead guilty to one count of cyberstalking. He will appears in court in New York next Monday. Reported Reuters:

Before his extradition to New York, he denied the charges, said he had no anti-Semitic beliefs and said he was being framed and targeted as a black man.



“Make no mistake: this is a modern-day lynching,” he said in a telephone interview from the Warren County jail in Missouri.

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.