Update 4:55 PM: The trailer park brawl led spokesperson Matt Parrott to delete the neo-Nazi party’s membership list as well as its website. “There is no more party ma’am,” he told a reporter for the Daily Beast. This headline has been updated to reflect the development.
Matthew Heimbach, the chief of the Traditionalist Worker Party and one of the the most prominent leaders of the American white nationalist movement, was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly attacking both his wife, Brooke Heimbach, and her stepfather—fellow party leader Matt Parrott. According to a police report obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the bizarre events leading to his arrest stemmed from a tryst gone awry.
Videos by VICE
Apparently, Heimbach and Parrott’s wife, Jessica, had an affair that lasted three months. But Heimbach’s wife reportedly wanted to see if her husband would continue the fling despite having said it was over, Talking Points Memo reports. On Tuesday, Matt Parrott and Brooke Heimbach reportedly stood on a cardboard box outside a trailer home and spied on their significant others from the window.
According to at least one account in the report, the two began to have sex and Parrott went inside to confront Heimbach. Parrot said he poked Heimbach in the chest, and then Heimbach allegedly “choked him out” and caused him to lose consciousness. When he came to, Parrott took his younger step-daughter to a Walmart and called the cops, telling them that Heimbach’s wife may have taken a recording of the encounter. Meanwhile, Heimbach allegedly attacked his wife Brooke, grabbing her face and throwing her onto a bed. He was carted off to the Orange County Jail in handcuffs.
When the police arrived, all four people involved in the incident listed some variation of “white nationalist” as their occupation in statements, the Washington Post reports. For years, Heimbach has been trying to build a coalition of American white nationalists and make their ideas more acceptable in the mainstream discourse. He became famous for starting a white student union at Towson University, and was called the “affable, youthful face of hate in America” after he pushed a Black Lives Matter protestor at a Trump rally and got sued. He continued to drift even more to the right, and was a presence at Unite the Right in Charlottesville. Most recently, he was set to speak alongside Richard Spencer at a Michigan State University event that descended into a clash between racists and protestors.
Heimbach is now free on bond, but all is not well for the white nationalists of Paoli, Indiana, according to the SPLC.
“I’m done. I’m out,” Parrott apparently told the hate-group tracker. “SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.”
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.
