Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Juan Thompson To Plead Guilty In 8 JCC Bomb Threats

(JTA) — A St. Louis man and former journalist accused of making eight bomb threats against Jewish institutions, allegedly in a plot to take revenge on a former romantic partner will plead guilty to a cyberstalking charge.

Juan Thompson, 32, originally denied the charges in New York City federal court in April. But prosecutors said in a letter filed on Tuesday with the court that Thompson will enter a guilty plea when he appears in court on June 12, Reuters reported.

Before being extradited from St. Louis to New York, Thompson denied the charges, and said that he had no anti-Semitic beliefs and was being framed and targeted as a black man.

The cyberstalking charges are for eight threats against Jewish community centers and the Anti-Defamation League, which federal prosecutors say were copycat crimes during a wave of nearly 150 bomb threats to Jewish institutions during the first three months of the year.

Thompson, who had worked as a journalist at the Intercept news website, reportedly made some of the threats in the name of a former romantic partner he had been cyberstalking and some on his own in an attempt to portray himself as the victim of a frame-up.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.