Death of male model Jeff Thomas 'involved in romantic relationship with Peter Thiel' is being investigated by police as suicide

He looked into the face of pure evil and could not go on.

Either that or bloodsucker Thiel had a minion bump him off.

Maybe, maybe not- but Thiel is one fucked up gay man.

Thiel is not a fucked up gay man.

Thiel is just a fucked up man, irrespective of his sexual preferences.

So this dumb whore was living in a $13 million apartment Peter bought him while also secretly revealing details about Thiel's personal life to the press? The one thing Thiel hates more than anything in the world?

Congrats on your Darwin Award, Jeff!

I'd kill myself, too, if I fucked that ugly, evil motherfucker.

Wasn’t this Thiel married?

The SVB collapse and now this.

[quote]sexual preferences

What’s old is new again.

R6, yes, OP's article says he is married with 2 kids.

So much being made of this not-even-a-real-model himbo. Suicide, Murder or something else, it’s no great loss to the world.

[quote] Feel like the only places in US are LA and NYC and Miami … and maybe SD and DC and Chicago … but that’s really it

Nice to know that Peter's got a datalounge account.

R10, Hi Peter!

Gay men and lesbians have a sexual orientation, dear R3. Not a "sexual preference."

R12 Can you Theil it?!

^*Thiel. Fuck!

There's something really dark and malevolent going on with Peter Thiel. I wouildn't be at all surprised if he instigated that run on SVB just to stir up some political shit or get back at somebody.

r16 Maybe he just wanted to drown his sorrows in a multibillion dollar bank run.

This is the article that dropped the Thiel link. They had been planning a big expose with the rentboy on Peter up until this most untimely death.

Take heart, Mr. Thiel. Some problems have a way of working themselves out, with time and prayer.

My first theory was that someone felt anger towards Thiel for his involvement in the SVB crisis, and they wanted to get back at him. I'm sure he's made enough enemies with his meddling in Silicon Valley, Web 3, and politics. But no, this Jeff guy was a full blown idiot, thinking he could become famous off of this expose. Well, he got what he wanted! PS. Check out the house. What an ungrateful bitch! Also if my "boyfriend" bought me this, I would be scared for my life.

I remember there was a thread with another instagram hoe who was rumoured to be his BF a few years ago - similar cornfed type but twinkier. Pics of him with roses in Thiels rumoured SF house. But IRC (and maybe Im not) that happened around the time he got married or engaged or something to the husband who no one knew who he was and then heard nothing more of the twink.

That house at R20 is like my L.A. wet dream. OMG.

R22 Well it’s available now!

Questions I have that will never be answered are : Who was paying the rent on the new apartment? He doesn't seem to have had enough work to afford that expensive new place . Did Thiel cut him off because JT was speaking out about Thiel in that interview? Did he fall from the 57th floor? Did he leave a Suicide note? Did anyone actually see him fall?

He didn't have a hot ass from the pics in this thread. . .

R25- He's got a flat ass now.

Never a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you especially when that hand is attached to someone rich as fuck.

R27- Rich as fuck and evil. Very bad move as he should have known, but why would he do that?

Homosexuality is deeply depraved, no matter the social class.

I didn't take Thiel as the horny type of guy who has a lover but I also heard he was outed because he kept sucking twinks off so maybe he's an horny guy after all.

i demand capital punishment for peter theil

deport R29, mike pence to uganda

Isn't this straight out of the Putin playbook, somebody "falling out a window"

R20- peter theil must hv bought that house to shut jeff up bcoz as it has been documented, he has never hesitated to throw anyone under the bus for his personal gain. Jeff must hv something, he did not want anyone to find out

R33- out of the hospital window

[quote] romantic

Yeah.

No disrespect to the deceased, but Jeff Thomas was a 35-year-old "male model and Instagram influencer." How could he have afforded his lifestyle without assistance?

Contrary to DL fantasies, outside of a select few, male models don't make much money, and even fewer at 35.

R37- Exactly so who was paying his rent in Miami and why did he leave the LA home, which was a gift to him as I understand it?

R36 any idea what that clip is from? New icons unlocked!

R18, how long until Thiel finds some victim of The Intercept to bankroll a case against them...and thus drive them into bankruptcy? See also: Gawker.

R16, you're probably right. Isn't Thiel one of our dark overlords who supported Trump as a way to fast track the demise of democracy?

Thiel is one evil fuck. Triggering a bank's downfall that leads to a domino game of chaos aligns with his political agenda.

As I understand it from studiously following only the finest gossip rags.

Thiel should be taxed out of existence.

If Thiel didn't like being outed as gay by Gawker, he's not going to like his social media private messages to college students being published, either (from the Intercept):

[quote] The parties Thiel and Thomas threw could get raucous, and Thiel himself would sometimes do the recruiting. Thiel, or someone using his Facebook account, reached out to one University of California, Los Angeles grad student, despite having no friends in common, and invited him to a party at Thiel’s house, describing the poolside scene. “Hot guys at a pool sounds like pretty idyllic gay activity to me,” the student responded, according to screenshots of the conversation obtained by The Intercept. They moved to a WhatsApp conversation using Thiel’s phone number.

[quote] “Well, it doesn’t stay idyllic too long,” Thiel’s account said, “but always lots of fun,” adding later, “Yeah, we know how to have some no holds barred gay fun.”

Maybe this will help bust a stereotype. You don't look at Thiel and think "no holds barred gay fun," but apparently it's so.

He means GG marathon and yogurt.

Thiel spends millions funding homophobes like J.D. Vance (who also wants to ban porn)

Thiel killed him!!!

R47 That's what I think and it's going to work out nicely because I need another trial to watch after Goop gets convicted for ski slope manslaughter.

“No holds barred gay fun” is going to have me giggling for days.

So this wasn’t a selfie death?

The death is under investigation. It has NOT been officially ruled a suicide or selfie accidental death (yet). The police said that Peter Thiel will be among those interviewed as part of the investigation.

This thread is no holds barred gay fun!

This thread is no holds barred boredom without some salacious rumor mongering and idle gossip over the cause of such a scandalous death. If scandalous means barely worth considering.

If his career was "influencer" they usually die taking a dumb selfie.

Why do people say "male model?" Can't we tell by his name or his photo that he's male? He's a model. You don't need to tell us he's male. We can figure that part out.

Hey, accidents happen. A lot of people fall out of windows

Like all those Russian guys

And that trans hooker who was about to spill the beans on Eddie Murphy

Reducing yourself to a piece of meat to be sold, and allowing others to treat you that way, will always have a profoundly destructive effect on your spirit. This man didn't want to be with Thiel as his interview makes clear but he took the cash. There's no doubt that affected his emotional health.

Selfie Death. I know it's a thing, but what a ridiculous way to die.

It’s funny that two narratives are being put out o tot he media deliberately which tells me it’s neither.

No way he was not shoved out of the window. Or this is the biggest coincidence in history.

Window or roof fall deaths are notoriously a Russian secret service technique. But they happen elsewhere, as with Eddie Murphy's trans hooker.

This story would be perfect for Ron Rosenbaum in his heyday or even Dominick Dunne. It seems like the "old school elite scandal, with larger issues attached" that Vanity Fair used to cover.

Gary Indiana might also do it justice, but he's not as connected.

Did Peter drink his blood?

PT wanted to know how it felt to "solve" a problem the way the savvy genius VPutin does, is all.

You know, try it out and see if he could get away with this too.

R64- I do not believe he fell taking a selfie.

He "fell"

Maybe he fell out of the window like Lexi:

It's all for you, Damian!

How many guys do you think Thiel and Geffen have on the payroll at any given moment?

No DLers have Peter Thiel stories?

Ask Milo.

So I guess Peter and the hubby have an open relationship

So open it's not a relationship in any meaningful sense of the word.

The wife did the dirty deed.

This guy used to be one of Thiel's twinks

So many whores in this world. Money can't buy self respect.

No, R76.

But it can buy pretty houses like the one at R20.

I heard that selfie death is the second leading cause of death for influencers. Right after tanning spray asphyxiation.

Are there photos of his balcony?

I wonder if any of Thiel's bitches ever met the same fate

See! I wasn't just an escort, I modeled actual clothes sometimes, not just underwear!

"entrepeneur" - that's putting it nicely

I begged Peter to fuck me but he said "Sorry, I'm not a chubby chaser! Lose some weight, fattie!"

That is one crazy puff piece interview.

There was a rumor going around years ago that Seann William Scott was being kept by Thiel

Farewell, My Concubine

SWS is still in good shape but a bit long in the tooth to be a kept boy.

I'm suing the datalounge! Watch out, Muriel!

Is that the queen who used to flip houses on Bravo?

He had that twink "intern" under his desk, and that hag who still believed he'd go straight and marry her after all.

R89, no, different guy

I bet Thiel just called up Vladimir Putin and asked if he could do a buddy a favor and make a problem disappear. This is how Putin has rid himself of all critics of his administration both in Russia or abroad.

Jeff should have sung this number to Thiel

Who will appear in I Fall to Pieces: The Jeff Thomas Story?

[bold]A month ago...[/bold]

Jeff: I can't believe my ears...

Peter: A dull cliche.

Jeff: Belong - to you? That sounds medieval - something out of an old melodrama...

[bold]Three weeks later...[/bold]

Peter: So does the history of the world for the past twenty years. I don't enjoy putting it as bluntly as this, frankly I had hoped that you would, somehow, have known - have taken it for granted that you and I...

Jeff: ... taken it for granted? That you and I...

[italic]He smiles. Then he chuckles, then laughs. A mistake. Peter slaps him sharply across the face. [/italic]

Peter: Remember as long as you live, never to laugh at me. At anything or anyone else - but never at me.

Pimps up, hos down

LOL!

MarkEMiller used to attend Peter Thiel parties...

This from a book ("The Contrarian") on Peter Thiel:

[quote] Elon Musk thinks Peter Thiel is a sociopath and Thiel thinks Musk is a fraud.

They both are very perceptive about each other, give them that.

Yuck R97. You sure you don’t mean Stephen Miller?

Who is Mark E Miller?

Someone needs to go to one of the "no holds barred" pool parties and report back!

Poor Peter. One bf dead, another indicted.

This is some shady ass shot going down and all of it will be swept under the rug. He runs Florida and the shadow state apparatus. The stuff going down in Florida is just absolute bonkers crazy stuff from the movies.

Someone needs to start looking into his OTHER kept boys

Thiel dirt

Premonitions?

R106- Eerie.

I know someone who was at one of Thiel's homes once and said it was like a gay Shangri-la, with a bunch of hot young guys running around in little shorts.

There was a hilarious article about an event at Theil’s house in Sf. It was supposed to be some salon with who’s who in tech like Melissa Meyer. He had no food at the event and some employee ran to Safeway and got some random sushi platter.

[quote] Death of male model Jeff Thomas 'involved in romantic relationship with Peter Thiel' is being investigated by police as suicide

So were they fucking. Was Thiel the top, pounding Jeff’s ass on demand.

It was romantic! They held hands while reading each other love poems!

Shows that instahoes are some of the dumbest creatures to walk the earth.

Missed

Tyler is fucked up and he used to date Kevin Miller and tag team Daddies on the East Coast. Tyler loves his young white boys and somehow convinces them to hook-up with rich Daddies. Tyler fucks these boys and then gives them to his Daddies. Kevin had several Daddies the past 3 or 4 years like Brian M. Altenburg, Peter Thiel, Michael Lorber, and David Geffen just to name a few while he was dating Tyler. Tyler and Kevin are both the same person and does the same shit.

Jeremy Cormier is a washed up Queen. He's shady as hell and doesn't give a fuck about anyone ecept himself. He will pretend to be your friend and fake being totally happy around you but it's his trick to gain your confidence and trust so he can pimp you out to his rich daddies like Bryan Singer, Peter Thiel, and David Geffen to name a few. He is basically a recruiter and pimp who caters to predators. The only reason for a hot young guy to be associated with Jeremy is if they are a prostitute and wants to be pimped out to daddies.

FACT: Kevin was Peter Thiel's boy toy. Kevin tried to date Peter but he already had a long-term boyfriend that he married in 2017. Kevin was desperate to have Peter but Peter only saw him as a good time and that was it. Kevin even tried to convince Peter to leave his boyfriend but that failed miserably. Kevin still hooks up with Peter after he got married. He flies Kevin up to SF almost every month or every other month for a sex filled weekend. Peter told me Kevin is great in bed and shoots a big load. I know Peter for over 10 years and I used to hook up with him to. I'm cool with it and wasn't looking for anything serious. Kevin has quite the eye and thirst for rich powerful men.

What do these guys have to do with Jeff, except that they all are on the boytoy circuit?

They know him from the boytoy circuit and will probably wind up like him

Jason Robert, another one of Peter Thiel's sugar babies

Not to be crossed

R119 He looks worth a squirt.

^ He was

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Maybe Thiel's husband was the culprit!

The setting sun

I think the timeline is important here. When did Jeff Thomas blab to the reporter/journalist was it before or after that New Year's party took place that he was ejected from by Peter's husband Matt Danzieisen?

I wouldn't believe the version of the breakup with Thiel that Jeff Thomas told in her interview. That he was breaking down and he couldn't stop Thiel from backing homophobic ultra-right wing politicians. Jeff Thomas' own brother described him as mentally unstable, depressed and a drug addict. These people are not easy to live with - it is just if not more likely that Thomas was given the boot by Thiel and not the other way around. He was expecting a payout like the Italian ex-boyfriend. Set up in an apartment with a car and cushy job. Obviously that didn't happen and at some point Thomas talked to the reporter which was absolutely anathema to Thiel. Really crossing the Rubicon. It is more likely he was dumped by Thiel and wanted to get back at him.

The story was suggesting that Danzeisen was ignorant of Thomas' existence - did that interview put him on to Thomas? Was Danzeisen already pressuring Thiel to break off with Thomas? Was the New Year's party after the interview and that is why Thomas was thrown out? Obviously, Thomas going to the party was an attempt to reconcile with Thiel - or just piss him off? A poster above said that Thomas was clearly very bitter and angry. On the other hand, he wasn't going to find another daddy on Thiel's level so easily.

Also, Thomas met Thiel around 2018 when he would have been just 29 or 30 years old. Still prime time. Skip forward to 2023 and Thomas is still very handsome at 35 but 40 is right around the corner and the boy has some serious damage going on. Thiel may have tired of the sugar baby.

Meanwhile, Thomas realizes that he is rapidly aging out and Thiel is vengeful. Thiel would get the word out that Thomas is more trouble than he is worth and a mess. After his indiscretion, Thomas would be tainted and not be able to get a billionaire or even a millionaire to keep him. He is probably living way beyond his means. That may have sparked the suicidal jump off the balcony - he felt he had no future. Add drugs and depression into the mix and you have a time bomb.

So while murder is not out of the question, the building Thomas was living in when he died would have had security cameras, the building would have known if someone entered the apartement. Also supposedly there were witnesses.

^ Actually they met in 2015 or 2016

So Thomas was thrown out if a party by Theil’s husband but how did he get inside the house? Isn’t there a guest list and security guards?

Why are so many people so deeply fucked up? People had to see the many kinds of wrong going on here.

When will the autopsy results be released?

I doubt an autopsy will reveal anything beyond fatal injuries sustained from a fall. The real question is, did he jump or was he pushed? I'm am assuming the latter.

R126 R131 This is the sequel to Sliver we never knew we wanted so bad!

The Future was bright

His body was great but basic. It was that large mouth and jawline and wide smile and the sparkling eyes that made him stick out. There was something almost “off” about the bottom half of his face. But it worked for him.

R134 Yes. Slightly close-set eyes too.

131- It will be interesting to find out if he had any drugs in his system, but yes, i can't imagine they will be able to determine/rule out injuries not associated with the fall unless it was something such as a broken hyoid bone from strangulation. ( Just an example)

Y’all need to see the sexy way he danced

A repost from the other thread

I wonder if he smelled good?

I am assuming defenestration at this point.

R139- Of it is possible and very likely - and yet... Why would such a vain man kill himself in such a gruesome manner? Leaving his beloved pet unattended and homeless?

Course ^

His body was not "basic"

Geez, he was hot as hell and had a slammin' body

R142- It certainly slammed that day. Slammed the ground below.

^ touche

Hopefully he got to pull a "Hit 'em Up Style" with Peter's money before he got cut off

I wonder if he had any sort of nest egg from.those years being a whore...It says he was taking EMT classes but I doubt that would of kept him in the lifestyle he was used too

Did he understood EMTs don't get to treat just the hot people?

R138: from my experience, guys with Jeff’s kind of skin texture - smooth silky like, tans easily - usually smell good

Probably has something to do with less perspiration being trapped in layers of hair follicles

DL Fave David Muir is said to smell very good, and he has the same kind of skin tone/texture as Jeff

He smelled like musk and roses

Aaaww, he did this with his momma

That’s perverse! Sick incest shit.

A goofy tik tok video isn't "incest"

Thiel is helping Elon Musk destroy Twitter

R153- So Kennedy is the Nazi-adjacent, I bet. He only bought Twitter to advance fascism. I hate those mf'ers more than I ever thought possible to hate anyone. But most of all i am angry that no one calls them out for what they are and what they are doing.

Awful, awful man

Thiel is frightening

I'm assuming it would be a huge mainstream scandal if a straight Republican mega donor was found to have a girlfriend while married with kids. And have many other girls that he is fucking. And have tons of orgies at his house and randomly hitting up college girls on facebook to attend the orgies. But he's gay, so "boys will be boys" and no one cares.

What happened to the Peter Thiel NYE thread?

Did that mofo threaten to do to the DL what he did to Gawker?

Has JT's cause of death or autopsy report been released? Anything?

R159, no, not yet.

Not sure if there are "shenanigans" involved or if the investigation is just taking a long time for whatever reason. Aaron Carter died back in Nov but there was no cause of death announced until April. Cody Longo's cause of death was just announced and he died a month before Jeff.

R160- Thanks, I had forgotten how it took in Aaron Carter's case.

It is weird how that recent long Thiel boyfriend death tread got deleted. It had lots of detail, and named names!

Do you think Thiel cared about his death, or saw it as a convenient way to move on? The more we hear about Thiel, the scarier it gets.

I think Thiel is a sociopathic narcissist and has no capacity for empathy and has no conscience. I also believe he is a predator and feels entitled to discard people if he has no more use for them. He only cares about himself and his needs and pleasure. He seems like a very cold hearted man.

Within a couple days of Jeff's death he was trying to destroy the Silicon Valley Bank

r164 nailed it

LOL @ The Onion

Who is Thiel's latest blood boy now that Jeff is gone?

Where have all the blood boys gone?

Long time passing

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Thiel supported Trump, who appointed the justices who voted for anti-discrimination. Hope people start refusing to work with him.

Any connection to the other hot underwear model who died mysteriously falling from a high rise luxury apartment building in Miami?

R170 R171 Doesn’t seem like Thiel’s type.

One can just picture him torturing small animals as a child.

^ yep

Weird, someone posted this on Twitter months before Jeff Thomas died

There's a new article about Thiel and Jeff Thomas out. Warning: it's clearly trying to paint Thiel as some sort of victim. Guess we just have to ignore all the anti-gay stuff he has funded.

Paywalled if you don't have a subscription so I'll post it in a few parts:

Last October, two weeks before the midterm elections, a budding model named Jeff Thomas walked into the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel for lunch with a friend who had been working with a well-connected Democratic political operative named Jack Bury. Thomas, then 35, dabbled in real estate, the art world, and the inchoate realm of social media influencing. But his most relevant avocation was as a former boyfriend of Peter Thiel, the multi-billionaire entrepreneur and Republican mega-donor. Thomas, who first met Thiel at Coachella in 2015, lived near the hotel at a $13 million place in the Hills that Thiel had underwritten.

Thomas was startled by the stakes of the meeting: Did he want to participate in Bury’s sprawling opposition-research project against Thiel, one that would pry into Thiel’s private life, apply pressure, and persuade him to leave national politics?

For six years, after all, ever since he appeared on stage during the 2016 Republican National Convention, Thiel had been a fixation in G.O.P. donor circles—a potential bottomless-pocketed heir to Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers. Meanwhile, he’d simultaneously developed into a fixation among Democrats, caricatured as a blood-swilling, Gawker-slaying, Trump-fluffing venture capital villain and putative Judas of the gay community, a portion of which could not square his personal orientation with his politics.

By late 2022, with the midterm elections in full tilt, Thiel’s political clout had only increased as he effectively bankrolled the Senate primary campaigns of his disciples J.D. Vance, in Ohio, and Blake Masters, in Arizona. Bury, backed by a handful of the country’s largest Democratic donors like Susie Tompkins Buell, saw an opportunity to both curb his influence and undermine his personal life.

Opposition research projects are the gruesome, dirty-nailed, and often invisible hand of politics—a staple of virtually every campaign, small and large, from Willie Horton to the George W. Bush D.W.I. to Swift Boats and more. It’s only gotten nastier and more personal in the digital age—Ashley Biden’s diary, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Billy Bush tape. In the post-Citizens United donor-empowerment era, mega-donors have found themselves in the crosshairs, too. When the Kochs began their rise, Democrats set up an entire research apparatus to probe everything from their business practices to their web of political nonprofits. Now Thiel was the target of a smaller, much more intimate guerilla crusade, one that appears to be ushering in a new frontier in our gutter politics.

The Brocktopus

Oppo, as it’s known in the trade, is a dark art, and Jack Bury’s mentor was one of its finest practitioners: David Brock. A former conservative journalist who dug around for dirt on the Clintons, Brock famously switched sides, founding Media Matters for America in 2004 and eventually becoming a close Clinton family ally. Gregarious and mischief-making, Brock relishes controversy, and he has been embraced by top Democrats who believed that they needed to employ grittier tactics to fight the modern G.O.P. His ambitions were supercharged after Citizens United, which allowed him to launch the American Bridge super PAC, alongside a half-dozen other advocacy and opposition-research groups.

Brock has also become a center of gravity in the Democratic money universe, assembling a network of mentees and allies, like Bury, that some donor-advisors like to call the “Brocktopus.” And Thiel has long been in his sights: Way back in 2012, before Thiel was a known quantity outside of Silicon Valley, Media Matters singled him out as a subject of possible scrutiny. “Thiel’s role in funding [Republican] attacks has gone completely unremarked and largely uninvestigated,” the group wrote at the time, in an internal memo obtained by The Daily Caller. “An opposition research team will serve to hold Thiel and others like him accountable.” At the beginning of the midterms, Brock’s American Bridge deployed a video tracker to try to record Thiel when he would make public appearances.

A decade later, the Brocktopus was finally attempting to encircle its white whale. In recent private conversations, Brock has mused about how satisfying it would be to go after Thiel. Brock was not directly involved in the day-to-day intelligence-gathering into Thiel, I’m told, just like he isn’t involved anymore at Media Matters or American Bridge. But he and Bury are longtime friends and professional associates: Bury earns the last line in the acknowledgments in Brock’s 2015 memoir, and they remain in the same social circle. (Brock declined to comment.) Several donors in Brock’s network who backed the anti-Thiel project, like Tompkins Buell, told me they were comforted by Bury’s connection to Brock. “It’s just gone so low—and you’ve got to fight back,” said Tompkins Buell, Hillary Clinton’s lifelong friend, taking a realpolitik view. “You’ve got to fight fire with fire.”

Tompkins Buell has been active in politics for 40 years, and while she laments the sordid state of today’s political world, she doesn’t regret what she’s backed. “So what are we going to do, sit around and talk about how much we care about the poor people and how much we want to take care and love each other?” she told me. “We’ve just got to get out there and look out for ourselves and fight for what we believe in, and stand up for ourselves, and try to defend ourselves from these people.” She continued: “This never used to happen that I know of. I didn’t get down and dirty. This is really down and this is really dirty.” But alas.

Once Upon a Time in West Hollywood… Oppo typically trafficks in high-school yearbooks and FOIA requests. This operation was far more laborious. Last summer, Bury set up a WeHo office and began amassing a group of activists to help him conduct dozens of interviews with people who might know Thiel. They chatted at private residences, at the Century City Fairmount, and at the West Hollywood Hotel, among other places, all in hopes of obtaining raw intel—Facebook messages, texts, private Instagram accounts, recollections—that Bury could vet and package in order to embarrass Thiel or weaken his image.

They were particularly interested in men who had attended his lavish parties or hung out with him socially. Bury planned to funnel any relevant information primarily to Ryan Grim, the empowered D.C. Bureau Chief at the progressive publication The Intercept. Grim was working on a piece about Thiel that Democrats hoped would publish before the midterms.

Bury, the son of longtime ABC News correspondent Chris Bury, is hardly the most prominent person in the opposition research field. But he was aided by Jordan Cockeram, who was running for West Hollywood City Council on a platform that included supporting the LGBT community, and at times by Ryan Kenney, a popular D.J. Both of them were recruited by Bury’s sherpa, Erik Christianson, the son of a top Wall Street executive with connections to elite Democrats, political ambitions of his own, and what he told friends was an abiding hatred of Thiel. (They each declined to comment.)

It was not always a buttoned-up operation. Some people approached by the aggressive Bury team told me or their friends they felt like they were being cornered or misled about who was cooperating. The project could also feel disheveled at times, even to some people involved: One person who Christianson and Bury unsuccessfully solicited for information eventually went public about the operation in a widely-seen Instagram story that was swiftly forwarded by a friend to Thiel. Bury declined to comment for this piece, but I’m told he felt he was approaching his project using the standards of journalism, in which he began his career.

That October, Bury uncovered Thomas’s relationship with Thiel, the extent of which was not well known to even some of Thomas’s close friends. (Thiel, a longtime bachelor, married his partner Matt Danzeisen in 2017.) Bury was captivated: From afar, Thomas seemed like someone he could convince to dish. Who knew, perhaps one day Thomas could go on TV and talk uncomfortably about the relationship?

And so over lunch that October afternoon at the Polo Lounge, Kenney, Bury’s frontman, encouraged Thomas to participate in the reporting process. Genuinely trying to protect his friend while also helping Bury, he attempted to persuade Thomas to cooperate with the campaign, suggesting that maybe he could get his name excised from the Grim piece if he was a useful source. Thomas, in a fragile mental state at the time, left the meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel intrigued. But he was also deeply concerned about the disclosure of his relationship, he would tell a friend.

Soon after the lunch, Bury and Thomas spoke by phone, and appeared ready to proceed. But Thomas later had an angry change of heart, just as Grim was en route to the airport to interview Thomas in L.A. So Bury upped the ante. Just before Election Day, on November 4, Bury texted Thomas directly. “Please don’t shoot the messenger,” the message began. “Ryan [Grim] proposed at least having a conversation with him about what you’re comfortable with having printed and what you want redacted. He’s an honest journalist … and being offered the option to approve a reporter’s final draft beforehand is super rare,” he wrote. “But I pushed for that because I like you & I didn’t want you to be caught off guard. Your name will be in print anyway, so why not control it and be protected?” Bury encouraged Thomas to connect with Grim in Miami the next day, and offered to chaperone the meeting. Bury was presumably speaking loosely, anything to get Thomas to cooperate. “I absolutely never promised that to him or anybody ever. Review and approve a draft? That’s absurd,” Grim told me.

Bury seemed desperate to enlist Thomas. He suggested that there was real money to be had if Thomas cooperated and extricated himself from Thiel. He texted that a New York P.R. executive “thinks you could easily get a book deal for $3-4 million if you tell an story [sic] about your past 5 years,” Bury said. “We would be willing to 100% pay for a top NYC book agent/attorney. Idk if you like writing but it would be cathartic.” The P.R. executive told me that conversation never happened.

The project wasn’t expensive, but Bury’s team and donors were willing to make small direct payments to people for their time or documents. One person who was approached told me that Christianson offered to help pay for the deposit on an apartment, for instance. (Though that has also been framed to me as an act of charity.) Of course, a Thomas tell-all would not fetch anywhere in the stratosphere of $3 million to $4 million, as Bury suggested; and, obviously, Grim is an influential reporter, not some stenographer. But Thomas, a political neophyte caught in a financial tug-of-war between Thiel and the Democrats, wouldn’t necessarily have known any of that.

Thomas was also in a vulnerable place in his life, according to many interviews with his friends and texts he exchanged that I saw over the last few months. He experimented with serious drugs, partied multiple nights a week all around the globe, and feasted on the vanity of social media. And he had complex emotions about Thiel—he seemed to enjoy living in a $13 million home and driving a fancy car, both of which Thiel provided, but he had also felt “kept” by him, as he would eventually tell Bury’s team in a recorded conversation. For Thomas, speaking to the researchers seemed to function as a form of therapy: it made him feel like he had control, according to people he told of the encounter, and in some ways he felt like he was speaking to Thiel, saying things aloud that he felt uncomfortable articulating to him directly.

Eventually, Thomas concluded that he would be willing to meet with Grim just before Election Day. Thomas had planned to sit down with him at the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne for an in-person interview—Thomas wanted a massage and facial beforehand, which the researchers booked—but then Thomas flaked yet again at the last minute. Grim and Thomas would later chat by phone.

In the immediate aftermath of the interviews with researchers and Grim, according to people who talked with him, Thomas felt that he made a serious mistake in aiding what he described privately as a “shakedown.” At times, his apprehension veered into paranoia, with Thomas telling friends that he was having nightmares about his name appearing in the news. Several friends and his Republican family members, upon hearing about the operation and his worsening anxiety, encouraged him not to talk. By mid-November, Thomas was telling friends that Democratic operatives had tricked him and were bullying and targeting him and Thiel. Thomas even talked about how he might get revenge.

At a dinner with Thiel on November 15, he would later tell friends, Thomas confessed that he had spoken with the researchers and Grim. Thomas took responsibility for what happened, and said that Thiel encouraged him to look forward, not put so much blame on himself, and move out of the house. Thomas, attempting to move on with his life, relocated to Miami.

Over the following days and weeks, meanwhile, the momentum behind the Thiel exposé appeared to peter out. Grim’s article, which Bury was pressing to get published before the midterm elections, never materialized.

For months, I had heard murmurs about the Democratic operation on Thiel, but its details were closely guarded by those in Brock’s orbit. Then the saga took an unpredictable and tragic turn. Shortly after 4 p.m. on March 8, Thomas was found dead on the pool deck of a Brickell highrise. The Miami Police rendered his death a suicide, according to an official report that I obtained. Thomas and Thiel had spoken on the phone earlier that day, and Thomas had expressed a vague need for help, I’m told. “We have no comment and believe we have all data points from a very complex situation,” Jeff’s stepfather, Matt Thomas, told me last month.

Days after he died, Grim responded to the unfortunate news peg and ran a version of his reporting that highlighted Thomas’s relationship with Thiel, titled The Death of Peter Thiel’s “Kept” Romantic Partner Is Being Investigated as a Suicide. The piece ran the gamut—Thomas’s take on Thiel’s politics, his description of his personal life, etcetera—but Thiel allies felt it positioned the donor unfairly close to Thomas’s death. Grim noted that he had interviewed Thomas in November but he also interspersed the quotes from his conversation with many others that he acknowledged that he had obtained from October “recordings of interviews” with “several Democratic and progressive activists who are working to expose what they see as Thiel’s hypocrisy.” Grim did not name the activists, and only sometimes specified which quotes came from which. (None of the recordings were made illegally, according to my reporting.)

Grim also presented other details that appeared to have been oppo-procured, such as a Facebook message from Thiel’s account inviting a UCLA student to a daytime party at Thiel’s home. A few weeks later, a reporter at The Daily Mail also somehow obtained “audio transcripts” of Thomas’s interviews with a third party, although the reporter did not mention how she received them. (The piece was about a purported row between Thiel, his husband, and Thomas at a New Year’s party. Thiel’s camp and a few others in attendance have denied to me that there was a confrontation.)

Meanwhile, Thomas’s death was a personal tragedy, one that his friends and family feel should be mourned privately, without political weaponization. A friend of Thiel’s said that the billionaire remains very “distraught” by Thomas’s death. Thiel feels like just another Brock target. “I never thought I would say this, but it’s made me more sympathetic to Anita Hill,” Thiel told me. He otherwise declined to comment for this piece.

The New Oppo Era On some level, the anti-Thiel campaign is at the vanguard of a few new political trends. The first is what you might call Oppo 2.0, a new era in which researchers—savvy with Instagram tags and pittance checks—are cosplaying as journalists and private investigators. At one point in February, a member of Bury’s team attempted to reach out to Ronan Farrow for advice on how to establish trust with a “victim.” (Farrow did not respond to the message.) But the project has also exposed a subterranean tension within modern politics—how much is too much? Do the ends justify the means? Where do we draw the line anymore?

“It’s not like they don’t dig into Soros’s life,” said a Democratic donor who has followed Bury’s moves and supports them—but only if they get the goods. “Having said that, I am ultimately a believer that unless you’ve broken the law, your private life really is your private life.”

Another Democratic operative who worked against a Thiel candidate was originally aghast when they first heard about Bury’s operation last fall. “There are some folks who feel like that’s not how we should be doing things. And other folks are like ‘fuck them.’ They’re playing gutter politics. Why shouldn’t we be playing gutter politics?” the operative said. “We live in gutter world now, and that’s not going away.”

Nevertheless, Bury’s team is proud of their year of work, which successfully showed how investigations into a donor’s personal life can, consciously or not, chill their activity. Over the last few years, Thiel has come to recognize, I’m told, that he may have been naive about life as a mega-donor. For many reasons, he is not planning to be a major player in the 2024 presidential cycle.

But like much of politics, these days, that all misses the larger point. In the end, the Brocktopus didn’t hook its white whale, a game-changing pre-midterms Grim story never dropped, the billionaire somehow became a quasi-sympathetic victim of their campaign, and somewhere along the way, a young man died. Who won here?

Thank you for posting from the article, R182. Why JT would give an interview like that has never been made clear to me. He must have known doing this would more than likely end his relationship with Thiel? Financial gain from a tell- all book may have been a motivation for JT but I really do not see how he could have expected such a book to be of interest to people outside of their social set. At least we finally know that the police have ruled his death a suicide, but as far as I am aware nothing has been released to the public and it is doubtful it ever will be. It leaves many unanswered questions.

^ Yes, I wonder why there has been no announcement of his cause of death

R176- How creepy!

R184- Isn't cause of death or manner of death considered public information or am I mistaken? We don't know if drugs were found in his system, if a suicide note was found - nothing. Such secrecy gives the appearance of a cover up even if there isn't one. It looks shady.

"Such secrecy gives the appearance of a cover up even if there isn't one. It looks shady."

Yep

There was a thread about Thiel's concubines on malegeneral that someone must have complained about because it was shut down

The one year anniversary of Jeff's death. RIP. Too bad you're dead while Peter Thiel still walks around.

Jeff Thomas didn't own the fancy LA house. I wonder if he was given anything substantial in return for fucking that hideous fascist ghoul. I would want at least 10 million for debasing myself like that.

Hey, he did get a car

[quote] “No holds barred gay fun” is going to have me giggling for days.

What better description is there of the DL?