A former reporter for a news website was charged on Friday with making more than a half-dozen bomb threats against Jewish community centers, schools and a Jewish history museum, federal authorities said.
The man, Juan Thompson, 31, of St. Louis, made some of the threats using his own name and others implicating a former girlfriend as part of an effort to intimidate her, the authorities said in a federal complaint unsealed on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
In one threat, made on Feb. 1 against a Jewish school in Farmington Hills, Mich., the complaint says, Mr. Thompson claimed he had placed two bombs in the school and was “eager for Jewish newtown,” an apparent reference to the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman killed 20 students and six school employees.
