If you’ve spent any kind of time on the internet in the last 24 hours you’ve likely to see some phrases floating around that are utterly mystifying when put together: Monkey bite, special teams coach, and “Pole Assassin.” It’s like a word cloud from a piece of Harry Potter fanfic. Instead it’s one of the most bizarre and confounding sports stories of the year, that keeps getting weirder with every layer of the onion you peel back.
A Texas football coach’s monkey bit a child and started the strangest sports story of the year
The monkey, “Pole Assassin” and Halloween have made everything go wild.
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
It should be noted that at this point everything in this surreal scenario has been unearthed by internet sleuthing. Without any official statement at this time, everyone is just trying to piece this together.
A trick or treater was bitten by a monkey at the home of Texas Longhorns special teams coach Jeff Banks
This element of the story first came from Tom Campbell, a sports photographer and Houston native first gave us the start of this story.
This sounds so fantastical it couldn’t be real, which is why everyone started to try and piece together why Banks had a monkey at his home on Halloween, and how it could have bitten a child.
Then, with some digging, people seem to have found the answer — and it came from Banks’ girlfriend.
“Pole Assassin,” and her performance monkey
Danielle Thomas, a former exotic dancer who once appeared on The Jerry Springer Show under the name “Pole Assassin,” uses a pet monkey named “Gia” as part of her act. Thomas calls the monkey her “emotional support animal.”
This weekend Thomas (who often uses the last name Banks on social media) posted on Nextdoor that she was building a haunted house and maze for children on Halloween.
Following the biting incident, Thomas posted a video walking through her backyard showing the lengths any child would have needed to go to in order to get to her monkey, saying she took every precaution to ensure it wouldn’t be around the kids.
While Thomas deleted her Twitter account in the wake of “MonkeyGate,” the video was saved and reposted by those who saw it.
Thomas shows that the monkey was far away from her planned maze route, essentially adding that a child getting bitten happened because of their own fault.
“How can she viciously bite someone if they don’t stick their hand in there where it don’t belong? This is her home, and her home only. It’s already clear as day on the gate “Don’t touch,” nobody’s allowed back here without my permission.”
Neither Banks, nor the Longhorns have commented on the monkey biting a child. Thomas has since deleted her social media accounts as people try to learn everything they can about Gia, the biting, and how this all fits together.
Just a constant reminder that when sports want to get weird, only college football has the power to give us something like this.
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