Widow of anti-left troll sanctified by Israel lobby says she feared for her kids’ safety if left with him

Last week, Skwawkbox covered comments by Rachel Hewitt, the widow of Pete Newbon – a lecturer and anti-left troll, and director of the so-called ‘Labour against Antisemitism’ (LAAS) group at the heart of the ‘Labour antisemitism’ smear scam – accusing Newbon of years of abuse and of living a ‘secret double life’ before his eventual suicide that almost cost her and her children their home as he was sued for putting a critic of the scam in physical danger through a series of abhorrent smears and lies.

Now, in a new post to her blog, Ms Hewitt has written of the “red flags that set [her] ‘spidey senses’ tingling… warning us that there is something dreadfully wrong with a relationship, a man or a situation” and again accused him of abuse – and described the deeply unhealthy obsession exhibited by a man whose overall politics she agreed with but whose fixation with attacking the left drove him to terrify his family, abuse others and “decimate” her and her children’s lives.

She writes:

In the years before my husband’s suicide, I had grown increasingly worried about his social media use. In the latter half of the 2010s, he became involved in [LAAS and other anti-Labour groups]. Soon this led to him spending escalating hours alone on his laptop, or on his phone, zoned out of family life. He developed an aggressive, angry, sarcastic tone of voice online; so different from the gentler manner he had adopted when we first met. I largely agreed with his political analysis, but I worried about how he was reorienting almost every discussion at home around anti-Semitism. I worried about how he was spending the nights drafting long, repetitive monologues to post on Facebook, each one extending over five pages or more on Word. I worried about an increasing distraction, recklessness and lack of care in his behaviour both on- and offline, such as forgetting to turn the gas off on the oven, or to strap the children into their car seats. I worried about his need to be right in every discussion or argument, and about his explosions of anger, around which I and my daughters tiptoed, so as not to ignite another one.

I raised my worries with him frequently, and even arranged for him to have specialist psychotherapy, but each time I ended up being convinced – and convincing myself – that there was no crisis on the horizon. But I was wrong, and there was. First, in May 2021, a tweet he posted had a disastrous fallout, in the sheer quantity and nature of the public attention it attracted. Actions he took and events that occurred in the aftermath, along with other things that were going on in his life, combined to make him decide, in January 2022, to take his own life: a violent, traumatic act that decimated the lives of myself, my children, and his family and friends. But why had I been convinced, so many times, to ignore the… warning signs, that had been clamouring at me for years?

…One of the most damaging aspects of this isolation was that I had no witnesses to observe my husband’s behaviour, and to corroborate (or contradict) my perceptions and worries. My only friend, my only witness, was him; and he was denying that there was anything wrong. There was also no-one nearby to help me with the practicalities of deciding whether to leave. Isolating women is a well-known tactic of abusers, and one of its outcomes is that it undermines a woman’s ability to trust her own perceptions.

…Every time I raised my worries about my husband’s compulsive behaviour and patent unhappiness with him, he batted me away : ‘there’s nothing wrong with me’, ‘don’t be ridiculous’, ‘you don’t understand because you’re not Jewish’, ‘you should be supporting me, like I support you in your feminism’, ‘I’m horrified that you think I should be in an institution’, ‘there’s nothing to worry about: this is all in your head’, and ‘you don’t love me: if you loved me, you’d support me’.

And she goes as far as to say that she felt her children would have been in danger with Newbon if she had tried to leave him and then failed to retain custody because he had far greater resources:

Even if I’d trusted my perceptions that something was dreadfully wrong in my married life, what was I going to do about it? I organised therapy for my husband, and he refused to go. He was a grown man: I couldn’t physically make him. And in terms of removing myself from the situation, well, I had no family, no job, no savings, no friends with whom I could stay. And I worried about the children’s safety, if my husband ended up fully in charge of them. In contrast, my husband had a wealthy and supportive family, including a divorce lawyer father, a permanent full-time job, and ‘proof’ that I was mentally unstable.

At the time of his death, Hewitt did the usual thing of not ‘speaking ill of the dead’ and described Newbon as “my best friend… my beautiful kind husband”. His fellow Israel supporters who despise the left for its support for Palestine tried to portray him as some kind of Zionist ‘saint’, setting up an ‘award’ in his honour for others who go furthest in promoting their ideology and attacking those who oppose it – which they euphemistically describe as “contribut[ing] the most to the public understanding of antisemitism.

But Rachel Hewitt’s eulogising has given way to a frank recognition of the chilling reality of living with a husband dedicated to promoting Israel’s interests and then of dealing with the aftermath of his suicide after the chickens of his abuse, trolling, smears and libels came home to roost. The Israel lobby, in its devotion to its racist and murderous ideology, continues to lionise him, ignoring her revelations, making it all the more important that they are shared, read and digested.

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