An Arizona man who sent hundreds of threatening messages to a Jewish-owned hotel in New York City was sentenced to 49 months in prison on Thursday in federal court.
Donovan Hall, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded guilty to threatening and stalking the Jewish proprietors of Manhattan’s Historic Blue Moon Hotel. He also received a three-year supervised release sentence.
Randy Settenbrino stated in an interview last year that the Blue Moon Hotel is “dedicated to the Jewish community in every way that we can be.” The hotel has rooms named after Jewish Lower East Side legends, a kosher cafe, and a mural depicting 2,000 years of Jewish history.
Settenbrino and his employees had only recently started receiving roughly 1,000 threatening messages from Hall, according to investigators. The communications, which were sent between August and November 2024, promised to “torture, mutilate, rape, and murder them and their families,” according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
According to his federal indictment, Hall texted photos of two firearms and a machete to one of his victims in October, saying, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children” and “for the Zionist cowards.”
“Donovan Hall targeted Jewish victims with a sustained campaign of intimidation, terror, and harassment,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a statement. “The approximately 1,000 threats he sent to these New Yorkers were alarming and brazen.”
Hall’s messages coincided with a boycott of the hotel begun after Settenbrino’s son, an Israeli soldier, was identified as posting videos of shooting at destroyed buildings and detonating bombs in homes and a mosque in Gaza.
Hall, who has been held in New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year, apologized for his behavior in a sentencing submission to the court, stating that he “wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time.”
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after Hall’s imprisonment, Settenbrino stated that “baby killer” had been spray-painted on the windows of his hotel, and fliers had been plastered across Manhattan calling for a boycott and referring to his son, Bram, as a “war criminal.”
“We’re sitting at a pivotal time in New York City, where we’re feeling the encroachment of hate and antisemitism in the West, like our brethren are feeling it in Europe, and so it’s very scary for everyone concerned,” said Settenbrino. “It’s very important that there are strong sentences handed out to this, not just for us, but for klal yisrael [the Jewish people] in general.”