Prominent Putin Critic Dies under Mysterious Circumstances in D.C., Friends Suspect Foul Play By Diana Glebova
A fierce Latvian-American critic of Vladimir Putin living in exile in Washington, D.C., was found dead Sunday evening on the sidewalk outside his apartment building, police said.
Authorities told National Review they don’t suspect foul play, but those close to 52-year-old businessman Dan Rapoport are raising questions about the circumstances surrounding his death, which they doubt was the result of suicide.
“The stakes of getting to the bottom of [Rapoport’s death] are high,” prominent Russia historian and journalist David Satter, who was a friend of Rapoport, told National Review.
“So much in this doesn’t make sense, that clarifying this has got to be a very, very high priority,” Satter said, adding that his death could possibly be an “organized assignation” carried out by Russia in the streets of America’s capital, but that more information needed to be released to determine how Rapoport died.
The Metropolitan Police Department responded “in reference to a jumper,” and filed a police report about their discovery at 8:50 p.m. on Sunday.
Police officers found articles of clothing, a broken headphone, a cracked cellphone, $2,620 and a Florida driver’s license at the scene, according to the police report.
Rapoport was pronounced dead at the hospital.
“It’s a current and active death investigation, we are still waiting for cause and manner of death from the office of the chief medical examiner, but at this time we don’t suspect foul play,” a representative for the Metropolitan Police Department told National Review.
The first person to report Rapoport’s death, before his case was made public by American media, his family, or the police, was Russian journalist Yuniya Pugacheva via her Telegram channel.
Pugacheva claimed on Tuesday that Rapoport had committed suicide, and had “released his dog into the park with money and a suicide note.”
She also said she had seen Rapoport, owner of Moscow club Soho Rooms, in May while in a London bar in the company of “young women” after his wife had allegedly left him.
The Russian journalist revealed that she had not consulted Rapoport’s widow before releasing the information about his death, and has since refused to disclose her source publicly, keeping quiet about how she knew the details surrounding his death before anyone else.
“The information I gave was from my source who was close to the family and his closest circle, but for obvious reasons, I can not advertise who it was. My source wants to stay anonymous,” Pugacheva told National Review.
Rapoport’s widow, Alyona Rapoport, said that her husband did not commit suicide, and disputed Pugacheva’s details.
“There were no notes, no suicide, no trip to London, no departure,” Alyona Rapoport told Russian outlet RBC.
Pugacheva stressed that she had seen Rapoport in London, and that she had “spoken to him personally on May 15,” despite his wife’s insistence that there was “no trip.” She said her whole table had seen her with Rapoport at the bar that day.
Satter said that “the most suspicious aspect of this whole thing” is Pugacheva’s behavior.
“She needs to be asked why she’s not willing to explain her source of information, and when she got it. She could well be an accessory to murder,” he added.
Another friend of Rapoport, journalist Jason Jay Smart, told National Review that “there were some suspicious things that needed to be looked into” and “that it seemed the case might have been not examined carefully enough, yet.”
Rapoport left Russia in 2012 after protesting for the release of anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, who is currently serving a prison sentence in Russia. Rapoport lived in Washington, D.C., from 2012 to 2016, when he got divorced from his first wife, Irina, and sold his home to Ivanka Trump and Kushner.
He then moved to Kyiv where he met his second wife, virologist Alyona Rapoport.
In 2018, investigative journalist group Bellingcat reported that Rapoport was behind the pseudonym “David Jewberg,” a personality that had written extensively against Putin since the war in Ukraine first began in 2014.
Rapoport had publicly supported Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February, and his wife said he evacuated her from Kyiv and “returned there himself to help my country.”
Rapoport was supposed to meet her “in the United States,” she told RBC.
To determine what happened to Rapoport, police should look into “Pugacheva for a start,” Satter said, adding that security camera footage and a record of Rapoport’s actions months before his death would be crucial.
“What would have driven him to [jump from his apartment building?] We don’t know,” Satter said.
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