On Thursday, Juan Thompson was arrested and charged with making bomb threats against eight Jewish community centers. As the FBI continues to investigate the actions of Thompson, who was formerly a journalist with The Intercept before he was fired for fabricating news stories, former friends and acquaintances have come forward to provide stunning details about the anti-Semitic hoaxer's past.
Thompson was enamored with revenge
The New York Post reported on Sunday that Ian D’Emilia, who was Thompson's roommate at Vassar College in 2013, was once threatened by Thompson.
After Thompson was fired by The Intercept, a St. Louis reporter contacted D'Emilia for a statement, who described his former college roommate as being "peculiar." This did not sit well with Thompson, who embarked upon a campaign of cyber-terror against D'Emilia and the reporter who wrote the article.
“He said that he’d tell my future employers that I’m a racist and homophobe,” said D'Emilia.
Thompson then deluged his former friend's boss and graduate advisor with emails smearing D'Emilia.
Doyle Murphy, the reporter who wrote about Thompson's firing, fared worse. Doyle claims that she received a racist text from Thompson in October, reading: "You are a white piece of s--t who lies and distorts to fit a narrative".
Ironically, those were the same accusations against Thompson that led to his own firing.
Thompson then created fake Facebook and Twitter profiles, which he used to smear Murphy, claiming that she was a rapist.
Thompson's flights of fancy
There's just no other way to put it -- Juan Thompson is a pathological liar. During his senior year in college, he pretended that he had won the lottery and told friends that his memoir was being published by HarperCollins.
He told them he had been accepted to the University of Chicago law school. He made up stories about vacationing in Cuba and Senegal, uploading pictures that he found online to his own social media to make it appear as if he had actually been there. He uploaded a picture of another person's Malcolm X tattoo and claimed that it was his own.
Perhaps the strangest lie told by Juan Thompson involved Korean cuisine. The New York Post reports that, in December of 2016, Thompson tweeted a picture of kimchi, claiming that he had made it himself. A Google Images search revealed that the photo was stolen from another person's food blog.
In January, Thompson began tweeting regularly about bomb threats targeting Jewish centers, railing against the racism, bigotry and hatred of those who were behind the shameful deeds. It was the FBI who discovered that Juan Thompson was responsible for at least eight of them.
