Widow of anti-Corbyn troll Newbon – lionised by Israel lobbyists – accuses him of abuse

Pete Newbon committed suicide and had award named for him by LAAS, who falsely blamed left-wing Jewish Rosen for his death. Now widow says he lied and abused her

Pete Newbon was a Northumbria University lecturer and a director of notorious right-wing, pro-Israel smear group ‘Labour against Antisemitism’ (LAAS). During Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, Newbon became infamous after he posted an image of Corbyn reading to children that had been doctored to make it appear that he was reading an infamous antisemitic text, instead of Jewish author Michael Rosen’s ‘Bear Hunt’ children’s book.

Newbon later committed suicide and his right-wing supporters attempted to make him into some kind of Zionist ‘saint’, naming an ‘award’ after him and trying to blame his death on left-wingers who were outraged by his abuse of Rosen’s text. Those same supporters targeted Rosen himself particularly, despite a coroner’s inquest that never mentioned him once.

In May last year, Skwawkbox revealed that an ‘award’ set up by his supporters to honour Newbon last year accidentally exposed his record as a serial troll who was on a final warning from the university because of his appalling online activity and who was being sued, along with two others, by an opponent whom he had smeared and whose life he endangered, with his victim ultimately winning hefty damages in his lawsuit against the two surviving smearers. Newbon’s widow Rachel Hewitt then further holed his reputation, writing that Newbon had been ‘secretly pursuing’ court cases that put their family at risk.

And now Hewitt has gone further, accusing Newbon in a new article on her blog that of living a double life and of various forms of abuse in their relationship.

In a piece titled ‘Small Revolutions, Every Day: Feminist Life Advice for Very Hard Times’, Hewitt writes:

In January 2022, my husband took his own life, violently and without warning. In the aftermath of his death, I discovered he had been keeping secrets and living a double life, which demolished my perception of our relationship and made me realise how it had been, in many ways, abusive. This made the grieving process extremely complicated and I had to deal with the shocking loss, not just of him and of my day-to-day life as I knew it, but of the version of our fourteen years together that I had believed to be true. I also had to unpick the ways in which I had lost myself during our marriage, and how a difficult childhood had made me vulnerable to abuse later in life.

The Newbon award continues to be presented to ‘usual suspects’ of the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party – who also often happen to be apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza now and to equate condemnation of Israel as a perpetrator of genocide and war crimes is ‘antisemitic’. The late Newbon, clearly, continues to serve the Israel lobby as a saint and martyr, but it seems clear that in the eyes of his widow he was far from either.

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