Man charged for threatening NY hotel owners over videos soldier son posted from Gaza
Arizona suspect made hundreds of calls, including death threats, to Settenbrino family amid online campaign sparked by clips from war
Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.
NEW YORK — US federal prosecutors have indicted a suspect for sending death threats to a Jewish family in New York after their son, an IDF soldier, posted videos from Gaza that sparked anti-Israel protests against the family’s hotel.
The owner of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel, Randy Settenbrino, said the family had received hundreds of threats and been targeted by street protests and online harassment.
“They’ve done untold damage with bad reviews and with tying up our front desk, frightening our staff,” Settenbrino told The Times of Israel in a Tuesday interview.
The hotel is a family-owned business in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood with a long Jewish history, and has 22 rooms. The family has been operating the hotel since 2006 and painstakingly restored the building, which was constructed in 1879. The hotel leans into the area’s Jewish heritage, and has a kosher Italian cafe on the ground floor called the Sweet Dreams Cafe that features art by Settenbrino, including a colorful mural that depicts historical Jewish tragedies.
Donovan Hall, 34, sent hundreds of threats to the family and hotel, including antisemitic statements and threats of violence, according to the indictment filed in the federal Southern District of New York last week.
Hall, from Arizona, was charged with two counts of threatening interstate communications, and one count of cyberstalking, both felonies. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
“Donovan Hall allegedly unleashed a campaign of terror against several Jewish New Yorkers, allegedly sending scores of hateful, violent and antisemitic death threats,” Acting US Attorney Edward Y. Kim said in a statement. “No individual deserves to be at the receiving end of these types of threats or to be targeted because of their religion.”
Hall was arrested after an investigation by the FBI and NYPD.
Hall began making dozens of threatening, antisemitic phone calls to the family over the summer, when videos posted by Settenbrino’s son, Bram, drew attention from anti-Israel activists online and in international media. One of the clips showed a first-person view of a soldier firing a light machine gun at a group of distant buildings, and the second showed a building exploding. An account called Stop Arab Hate posted the videos, accusing the soldier of “indiscriminately shooting a gun,” and shared contact information for the hotel in a post that was viewed millions of times.
Settenbrino said his son served as a lone soldier in the Combat Engineering corps and had been in a firefight in the footage.
The criminal complaint references the videos and does not name the family, but Settenbrino confirmed his family and the hotel employees were the targets.
On August 8-9, Hall made 54 calls to the victims, the complaint said. In one of the calls, he told a hotel employee that he was going to travel to the hotel on his motorcycle and shoot the victim in the head. In another, he stated the victim’s home address and said he was going to shoot him and his family, calling the victim a “fucking Jew bag,” a “child-murdering Jew” and making other explicit and violent threats.
Between early August and late November, Hall called the victims at least 971 times, the complaint said.
In October, Hall allegedly started sending photographs of deadly weapons and threats to the victims. In one message, he sent a photo of a gun with the text, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children.” In another, he sent an image of a knife and wrote, “This knife is for child molesters such as your son.” Another showed a hand on a pistol overlaid with the text, “For the Zionist cowards.”
Law enforcement recovered the two firearms from the photos during a search of Hall’s residence at the time of his arrest. Neither weapon was registered in his name; one was loaded.
The threats were part of a larger campaign of death threats Hall sent to people around the US, often targeting Jews, prosecutors said. Hall also allegedly sent two voicemails to an organization that supports IDF troops, threatening the groups and telling them to leave the US.
Settenbrino said the calls were part of a harassment campaign aimed at the family and its hotel after their son posted the videos on social media. In addition to harassing the front desk with calls and posting negative reviews online, street protests prompted some guests to cancel their stays at the hotel and activists repeatedly attempted to hack into the hotel’s email system, Settenbrino said.
An anti-Israel group called Unity of Fields that encourages vandalizing targets it deems supportive of Israel posted photos in September of graffiti on the hotel. The graffiti said “Baby killer” and included inverted red triangles, a symbol the Hamas terror group uses to mark its targets in propaganda videos that has been adopted by anti-Israel activists in the US. Settenbrino said police had been unable to locate the vandals.
Hall was arrested last month but the case was initially sealed. Prosecutors announced the arrest last week.
The hotel has received plaudits from media including National Geographic and New York Magazine, but was struggling before the activist campaign. It was forced to close during the pandemic, leading to debts and a bankruptcy filing. Settenbrino said the business had started to recover before taking another hit from the anti-Israel activists.
The street protests have dwindled but the online harassment continues, he said.
Settenbrino said the family feels abandoned by local Jewish leaders, despite his longstanding community activism.
“We’ve had not one New York City Jewish politician otherwise come down and visit,” despite the family’s appeals for support, he said.
Antisemitism has surged in New York and across the US since the October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel. In New York City, Jews are consistently targeted in hate crimes far more than any other group.
