TWP chief Matthew Heimbach arrested for battery after affair with top spokesman's wife

Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, is free on bond after being charged with battery in southern Indiana after a bizarre sequence of events involving Heimbach having an affair with his chief spokesman’s wife.

Police in Paoli, Indiana, said Heimbach attacked his wife and TWP spokesman Matt Parrott early Tuesday morning after the two confronted him about the affair with Parrott’s wife.

After the arrest, Parrott announced he was walking away from the group.

“I’m done. I’m out,” Parrott told the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday. “SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.”

Parrott declined to comment further on Heimbach’s arrest or his resignation. His resignation came hours after the arrest and just days after he learned of the affair between Heimbach and his wife.

Heimbach, 26, posted $1,000 bond and was released Tuesday. He did not answer calls to his cellphone and did not return questions sent by text message from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The strange incident began just after 1 a.m. Tuesday, when Matt Parrott, 36, called police from a Walmart near his home. He fled to the Walmart with his step-daughter after a violent confrontation with Heimbach.

The step-daughter told police that Heimbach and Parrott’s wife had been having an affair for three months. Heimbach and Parrott’s wife said the fling had ended.

The step-daughter and Parrott’s wife tried to set up Heimbach to see if he would continue the affair after saying it was over, police said in a report.

During the set up at Parrott’s Paoli trailer home, Matthew Parrott and his step-daughter waited outside, standing on a box and watching through a window, police said. 

A confrontation ensued between Heimbach and Matt Parrott. Parrott told police Heimbach twisted him down to the ground, then “choked [him] out.”

“He grabbed and injured my hand after I poked his chest then choked me out with his arm,” Parrott said in a handwritten statement to police. “Then he chased me to my home and did it again.”

After police arrived, the responding officer overheard a verbal confrontation between Heimbach and his wife, followed by a “scuffle,” the report states. Heimbach’s wife said her husband kicked a wall, grabbed her face “and threw me with the hand on my face onto the bed.”  Police said the step-daughter recorded the attack on her cellphone.

In the report, all four people involved in the incident recorded their occupations as “White Nationalist.”

Parrott has been distancing himself from Heimbach and the TWP in recent days.

On the alt-right social media platform Gab, Parrott posted on March 9: “I have attempted to be a positive, uplifting, and unifying voice in the nationalist cause. At a certain point, even the most stubborn man must hold himself accountable to the fruit of his labor. My focus from here on out will be exclusively infrastructure and logistics.”

Heimbach started up the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) in 2013 after graduating from Towson University. He and his father-in-law, Parrott, later folded TYN into the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist organization cloaking itself in “traditionalism.”

The latest arrest puts Heimbach in jeopardy of going to jail for a prior incident.

Heimbach pleaded guilty in July 2017 to disorderly conduct in the assault of a protester at a 2016 campaign event for Donald Trump in Louisville, Kentucky.

Heimbach was fined $145 and sentenced to 90 days in jail after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct, a lesser charge. District Court Judge Stephanie Pearce Burke suspended the jail time so long as Heimbach avoids being charged with another offense in the next two years.

A probation hearing for Heimbach is set in Kentucky on June 1.

A federal civil lawsuit is pending against Heimbach, President Donald Trump and others stemming from the incident.

Heimbach’s scandal and arrest is the latest incident to rock the alt-right.

Over the weekend, Richard B. Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, announced he would forgo any more campus speeches for now after a sparsely attended speech on March 5 at Michigan State University.

Heimbach and members of the TWP were outside the agricultural pavilion where Spencer spoke, at one point physically fighting with and throwing rocks at protesters. By the time the fights ended, more than two dozen people — protestors and Spencer supporters — were arrested.

In the days after the Michigan State fracas, Heimbach posted on Gab: “Our speaker spoke at ‘your’ campus. We picked your best fighters up and threw them around like rag dolls until the police stepped in to protect y'all, and we even captured your flag, f------,” TWP wrote.

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