He’s in prison for trying to order a hit on his online crush. Cops say he’s still targeting women from behind bars

A onetime Republican political candidate from New Jersey serving a 17-year federal sentence for trying to hire a hitman to kidnap, torture, and kill a woman he met through an online dating service is facing new charges over a series of vile threats he made from behind bars, according to a grand jury indictment handed down this week.

“I will spank you and bruise you when I breed you,” Christopher Thieme allegedly wrote in December to a woman living in the Albany, New York area. “I will impregnate you soon. And keep doing so. You can’t run. I will destroy anyone who obstructs me. You belong to me and only me. Tick tock tick tock. Times [sic] up. Your body[,] my choice forever.”

Thieme, 45, is accused of repeatedly emailing the woman, who is not identified by name in court filings, from FCI Fort Dix, the South Jersey prison where he is presently incarcerated. He began sending the “harassing, intimidating, and threatening” messages last September, and continued to menace the woman for at least four months, the indictment states.

In a November 2024 email, Thieme allegedly wrote, “I can’t wait to hold you down and put a baby in you. It’s coming soon… No one will get in my way. You cannot belong to anyone else.”

A third example included in the indictment reads, “Your body. My choice. Forever. I snuck into your place to install hidden cameras. Shower. Bed. Etc. … I might sell them or put you on Pornhub… I am the only man who will ever impregnate you. Repeatedly. No one else can have you but me.”

Following President Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, far-right agitators gleefully began posting dark spins on pro-choice slogan, “My body, my choice.” Thieme’s words echoed precisely those of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who wrote on X, “Your body, my choice. Forever.”

A grand jury in Albany handed down the indictment on Tuesday. It was first obtained by Court Watch, an independent news organization that monitors the nation’s federal dockets for noteworthy cases.

Thieme does not have an attorney listed in court records. His most recent public defender, Patrick McMahon, did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Federal inmates can send and receive email to approved contacts via TRULINCS, a controlled, monitored messaging system, but are not able to access the internet. Recipients must give their permission before an inmate is allowed to email them; messages are limited to 13,000 characters — about two pages worth of text — and no attachments are permitted.

Thieme, who began his current sentence in 2016, was hit with one count of cyberstalking and three counts of interstate threats to injure another person. If convicted, he faces an additional five years on the cyberstalking count and five years on each of the interstate threat counts.

In 2018, Thieme was sentenced to 18 months in New Jersey state prison, to be served concurrently with his federal sentence, for subjecting an ex-girlfriend to what a judge called “one of the worst, most egregious cases of cyber-harassment that [he had] seen.”

Thieme made the social media posts in 2015, before he was sent away, calling the woman, who had a restraining order against Thieme at the time, a “promiscuous whore,” while claiming, among other things, that she had sexually transmitted diseases, and was mentally disturbed. Another set of posts were aimed at the woman’s new boyfriend, who Thieme attacked as a “sick, f****t pedophile,” alongside assertions the man had sexually assaulted young boys and his own sisters.

In 2005, Thieme was arrested after luring a woman back to a dorm room at Rutgers University and cracking her over the head with a pool cue. He was convicted on aggravated assault charges in 2007 and spent seven years in state prison.

Roughly a year after Thieme was released, he met a woman online and went on two dates with her before she attempted to cut things off. He then offered to pay a Pennsylvania man $25,000 to abduct the woman, hold her hostage for a couple of weeks, then kill her once Thieme had emptied her bank accounts and sold her home, according to court papers. But Thieme’s plot was foiled when his associate reported the plan to the FBI. Agents arrested Thieme in January 2016, and he pleaded guilty that December to charges of attempted kidnapping and murder-for-hire.

Before Thieme was sentenced, his attorney told the judge his client suffered from untreated mental illness, arguing, “It is devoid of any logic or intelligence that somebody could think they could get away with” such a scheme. In his own remarks to the court, Thieme called himself a “broken man,” and contended he felt “horrified” by his actions. Apparently unmoved, the judge told Thieme his plea for mercy rang “a bit hollow.”

Last August, Thieme applied for compassionate release from FCI Fort Dix, claiming he suffered from long Covid, and asked to serve out the remainder of his sentence on home confinement. (Thieme told Vice at the time that he would refuse the Covid vaccine because he didn’t want to be a “guinea pig.”) Again, his entreaties failed to influence the judge overseeing his request, who called Thieme “dangerous” and said his crimes had “devastated” his victims, and that a sentence reduction “would not reflect the seriousness of [his] offenses.”

Thieme ran in the 2002 Republican primary for a seat on the Sussex County Board of Freeholders. At the time, supporters dubbed Thieme a “grassroots wonder,” and a “man of the people,” according to the Sussex County Watchdog, a local politics blog. He received 3,000 votes against incumbent Gary Chiusano, who sat on the board until 2008 and now serves as Sussex County surrogate.