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“‘Crush! Crush! Crush Pol Pot and his clique!’ shouted the gang,” Mr. Thayer reported. “There, slumped in a easy wood chair, greedy a protracted bamboo cane and a rattan fan, an anguished previous man, frail and struggling to take care of his dignity, was watching his imaginative and prescient crumble in utter defeat.”
Slightly below six months later, in April 1998, an ailing Pol Pot died in his sleep at 73.
The jungle assembly produced a minor drama of its personal when Mr. Thayer gave Ted Koppel of the ABC Information program “Nightline” the American broadcast rights to his video.
The community instantly distributed each nonetheless footage and the video all over the world with credit score to ABC, which Mr. Thayer stated violated their settlement and scooped his personal article. ABC Information stated it had adopted normal observe, paying him for the fabric, giving him credit score however presenting it as its personal.
He declined to share a Peabody award with the community and introduced swimsuit, profitable an out-of-court settlement after years of litigation.
He additionally gained a cluster of awards for his investigative reporting.
Mr. Thayer spent many months writing a e book concerning the Khmer Rouge titled “Sympathy for the Satan: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge,” which supplied vivid descriptions of the trial and interview. The e book was marketed on-line, however for unclear causes it was by no means revealed, and Mr. Thayer carried the manuscript with him for years afterward.
Individuals who knew him described him as a brave reporter who was decided to dig for reality whereas cultivating a rugged, Coronary heart-of-Darkness picture and typically exaggerating his exploits.
Writing on his Fb web page on Wednesday, Robert Brown, the founder and writer of Soldier of Fortune journal, stated: “Goodbye to probably the most colourful, gutsy, by some requirements certifiable mad genius journalists I’ve ever encountered.”
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