A 33-year-old Cambridge man is facing federal charges after prosecutors say he waged a monthslong campaign of threatening emails against former business investors, including messages demanding he be let back into a Winchester venture studio residence he'd been evicted from. Patrick McDonald appeared in federal court in Boston on Wednesday on three counts of cyberstalking and three counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce, all tied to a dispute over his startup, Waev.
According to charging documents cited by WCVB, the three victims had provided McDonald with a venture studio residence in Winchester to help get Waev off the ground. Venture studios typically function as startup incubators, offering early-stage entrepreneurs seed funding, co-working space, and even physical housing alongside financial capital, according to Boston Venture Studio. The arrangement fell apart after investors say McDonald refused to produce business financial status updates or year-end audits, prompting one victim to advise the other two to pull funding over fears Waev might be a scam.
Eviction Followed Alleged $1.3 Million in Damage
The investors withdrew their funding and evicted McDonald from the Winchester residence, according to the charging documents. Prosecutors allege McDonald caused $1.3 million in damages to the property before he left. WCVB's report notes that McDonald began his campaign of harassing and taunting emails allegedly shortly after that funding withdrawal and eviction.
Federal authorities say the campaign ran from April 2026 through at least June, and the volume was staggering: McDonald allegedly sent 193 emails to one victim over a single seven-day period, and 259 emails to a victim's attorney over 11 days. A U.S. Attorney's Office press release noted that McDonald allegedly kept sending threatening communications even after harassment prevention orders were already in place prohibiting him from contacting certain victims, meaning the civil protective measures victims had already sought failed to stop the conduct before federal prosecutors stepped in.
Graphic Threats and a Direct Reference to the Eviction
The charging documents allege McDonald's messages grew increasingly violent and specific. On April 26, 2026, he allegedly emailed the three victims a graphic depicting a man being shot, along with the message, “Someone is getting shot in the [expletive] face if I am not put back inside that house.” That message directly tied the threats to the alleged motive: regaining access to the residence he'd been evicted from.
On December 3, 2025, McDonald allegedly emailed all three victims an image of one victim's face paired with a speech-bubble graphic captioned “kidnap his kids!” Charging documents further allege he threatened to kill a victim's son and, in a separate email, included a victim's home address alongside a threat to tear the victim's body apart limb by limb. On May 11, 2026, he allegedly sent two of the victims a depiction of a gun being pointed at a garden gnome.
Statutory Penalties and Legal Standard
Each cyberstalking count under 18 U.S.C. § 2261A carries a statutory maximum of up to five years in federal prison, three years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine, according to Eisner Gorin LLP. The three counts of transmitting a threat in interstate commerce under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) carry the same maximum penalties per count, per the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts. Across all six counts, McDonald faces a combined statutory maximum of up to 30 years in prison if convicted on every charge.
Under federal jury instructions tied to Section 875(c), prosecutors must prove that a communication constitutes a “true threat” expressing serious intent to commit unlawful violence — though they don't need to show McDonald actually intended or was capable of carrying out the acts, a standard rooted in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Elonis v. United States, according to guidance from the Northern District of Illinois. McDonald was already in state custody when he made his initial appearance on the federal charges Wednesday and remains held there, with parallel state legal issues still pending.
Part of a Broader Pattern in Federal Court
The case adds to a string of recent federal cyberstalking prosecutions. Hoodline previously reported on a nine-year sentence handed down in July 2025 to a Massachusetts IT professional who ran a multi-decade cyberstalking campaign across dozens of platforms, showing that judges in the same federal district have been willing to impose lengthy prison terms in severe cases.
The problem extends well beyond Massachusetts. A February 2026 study from SafeHome.org estimated that 7.5 million Americans experience cyberstalking each year, with 61% of stalkers relying on everyday tools like email and text messages — and fewer than 29% of victims ever reporting the conduct to police. Nationally, the volume of digital crime has also been climbing: an FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center report cited by SpyCloud found that annual cybercrime complaints topped 1 million for the first time in 2025, with total reported losses reaching $20.9 billion.
