Man who threatened Jewish hotel owners in NYC sentenced to 4 years in prison

NEW YORK — A federal court in New York City on Thursday sentenced an Arizona man, Donovan Hall, to 49 months in prison for threatening Jewish hotel owners over videos their son in the Israeli army posted from Gaza.

After his release from prison, Hall will be subject to three years of probation.

The sentencing guidelines for the case stipulated a sentence of 41-51 months in prison, meaning the sentence was close to the maximum under the guidelines.

“I think that justice was served,” Randy Settenbrino, whose hotel was targeted, told The Times of Israel on Friday.

“He really was a predator. He also abused my staff,” including with rape threats directed at a minor, Settenbrino said.

Hall has been incarcerated in New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year.

Hall apologized to the court, saying he did not “mean to be that person anymore.”

“There are people who absolutely did not deserve to be treated the way I was treating them. I wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time,” Hall said in a sentencing submission to the court. “It is time for me to accept this reality and offer my apologies to the victims and their families.”

US federal prosecutors indicted Hall last year for sending death threats to the Jewish Settenbrino family in New York after their son, an IDF soldier, posted videos from Gaza that sparked anti-Israel protests against the family’s hotel.

Settenbrino, the owner of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel, told The Times of Israel last year that 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 said.

Hall, 34 at the time of his arrest, sent hundreds of threats to the family and hotel, including antisemitic statements and threats of violence, according to an indictment filed in the federal Southern District of New York.

Hall began making dozens of threatening, antisemitic phone calls to the family last year, 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 IDF’s Combat Engineering Corps and had been in a firefight in the footage.

On August 8-9, 2024, 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 2024, 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.

Settenbrino said on Friday that the campaign had been initiated by the activist group Students for Justice in Palestine.

“They’re the ones who started this insane boycott of a family business,” he said.

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 group and telling them to leave the US.

In a separate case, the Southern District of New York on Tuesday sentenced an anti-Israel activist who attacked three Jewish people to 17 months in prison. That sentence was also near the maximum stipulated by sentencing guidelines.