D.C. police say they don’t suspect foul play. Fellow activists are incensed. And the city where it happened is barely paying attention.
The mysterious death last week of a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in Washington’s West End neighborhood is drawing fury from some of the Kremlin’s best-known global detractors — but scant notice in Washington, where police say they don’t suspect foul play was behind Dan Rapoport’s fall from a luxury apartment building on the night of Aug. 14.
“I think the circumstances of his death are extremely suspicious,” says Bill Browder, the formerly Moscow-based American financier who became a crusader for sanctions after the killing of his Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. Browder got to know Rapoport in Moscow years ago, before they both fell out of favor with the Russian regime. “Whenever someone who is in a negative view of the Putin regime dies suspiciously, one should rule out foul play, not rule it in.”
According to a Metropolitan Police Department incident report, officers responding to a call about a jumper found the 52-year-old Rapoport’s body on the sidewalk. He was wearing orange flip flops and a black hat and had a cracked phone, headphones and $2,620 in cash on him, but no wallet or credit cards. The police say the case remains open, even without a suspicion of foul play. As is standard for suspected suicides, a medical examiner’s report — which would typically reference medical or other records, include a toxicology screen and incorporate X-rays and other posthumous forensics to determine if there was a struggle before the fall — is pending.
The deceased was no mere exile. A Latvian-born U.S. citizen, Rapoport moved back to the U.S. in 2012 after making a fortune in Moscow but running afoul of the Russian government. Settling in Washington, he rubbed elbows with mover and shakers, living in a Kalorama manse that his family later sold for $5.5 million in 2016, when it became the home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. By then, Rapoport had relocated again, setting up shop in Kyiv, where he became a frequent contact of U.S. media.
In the eyes of Rapoport’s political allies, the history of untimely deaths of Kremlin critics makes the police’s initial no-foul-play conclusion seem naive. “He was a well-known critic of Putin in the West and had been an effective critic,” Browder says. “He was also an open supporter of [the jailed opposition leader] Alexei Navalny. And he had all these connections in the elite of Washington, D.C. The immediate response of the Washington, D.C. police, I think, is a premature and unhelpful conclusion.”
“Nothing adds up,” says David Satter, a longtime Moscow correspondent in Soviet and post-Soviet times who in 2013 became the first U.S. reporter booted from Russia since the Cold War. Satter, now a frequent Wall Street Journal contributor and the author of several books about Putin’s Russia, had stayed with Rapoport in Kyiv. “This is why it has to be investigated. But everything we do know is very, very strange.”
Rapoport’s death has been the subject of major coverage overseas, but is oddly off the radar in Washington, where there has been little major media attention. It’s a strange and possibly telling omission from our midterm-absorbed city’s water-cooler conversation: A number of high-profile figures are implying that a foreign government may have killed an American citizen in the capital of the United States. Even if their conjectures are overblown, it ought to be news.
The suspicions, Browder says, began when the news of Rapoport’s death first broke on the Telegram channel of a former editor of Russian Tattler, via a convoluted story that claimed Rapoport’s dog was let loose with a suicide note and cash attached to him. Because intelligence services often put out information through gossip sites, the location raised antennae. “How the hell did she [the ex-Tattler editor] learn about Dan’s alleged suicide?” asks Vlad Burlutsky, a Russian expat who met Rapoport through his work supporting Navalny.
In a Russian media interview, Rapoport’s wife denied the story about the note — and the suicide, saying her husband had been making plans and that she expected to be in Washington to see him. (The police report also makes no mention of a note or a dog.)
“I’ve talked several times to Alyona, his widow, and she says she is absolutely certain that it’s not a suicide,” says close friend Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of the Russian Duma to vote against the annexation of Crimea and now a strident Putin critic also living in Kyiv.
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Police say they do not suspect foul play in the death of Putin critic Dan Rapoport, but some of his political allies aren’t so sure.https://t.co/xKRaVZ3ZBO
— POLITICO (@politico) August 26, 2022
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