The message appeared in English on Emanuel Fabian’s phone.
“You have 90 minutes left to update the lie,” said a WhatsApp message reviewed by The Washington Post. “If you do this — you solve in a minute the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life. And you won’t remember me anymore in a week.”
Five days earlier, Fabian, a 28-year-old war correspondent at the Times of Israel newspaper, had published a short blog post reporting that
an Iranian missile had struck an open area outside a Jerusalem suburb, harming no one.
Until he began to receive messages that threatened his life and family, Fabian didn’t know his brief report had triggered a dispute over
bets on the prediction market Polymarket on whether an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10.
For those with money down, millions of dollars were potentially riding on his blog post. Fabian was spooked enough by the threats to at least entertain the idea of revising his published reporting, he told The Post in a phone interview Monday. That could score a win for Polymarket users who had bet against a missile strike occurring that day — and at least one had offered to send Fabian a share of the profits.
Instead, he stood by his post, reported the threats to the police and
wrote an article for the Times of Israel chronicling the harrowing experience. Fabian said he decided to publicize the story in the hope that “anyone who’s ever thinking about threatening a journalist will maybe think twice.”