Abused Mumford co-founder says 13 relatives died in Shoah
THE MUMFORD & Sons co-founder who quit the band after receiving vitriolic abuse for supporting a conservative journalist has revealed he has family members who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
In an essay published online, banjo player Winston Marshall said that leaving the band was necessary because his political views were causing the group too much trouble.
Mr Marshall was labelled a “fascist” by online trolls after tweeting praise for a book about far-left extremism written by the right-wing journalist Andy Ngo.
Despite holding “centrist” and “liberal” political views, the musician said he was pilloried by a “viral mob” accusing him of endorsing the far-right.
In his essay, Mr Marshall — who is partly Jewish — highlighted the absurdity of being labelled a fascist when 13 members of his family were massacred by the far-right during the Nazi Holocaust.
He said: “My grandma, unlike her cousins, aunts and uncles, survived. She and I were close. My family knows the evils of fascism painfully well. To say the least. To call me ‘fascist’ was ludicrous beyond belief.” Despite initially only taking a step back from the indie band, Mr Marshall wrote that now “the only way forward for me is to leave”.
He said: “I hope in distancing myself from them I am able to speak my mind without them suffering the consequences.
“I leave with love in my heart and I wish those three boys nothing but the best.”
Mr Marshall added he regretted the distress to his bandmates caused by his tweet. “Unintentionally, I had pulled them into a divisive and totemic issue.”
Mr Marshall said his bandmates had asked him to stay with them after the controversy occasioned by his tweet.
But when he decided to step back from the band, “another viral mob came after me, this time for the sin of apologising”.
“I could remain and continue to selfcensor, but it will erode my sense of integrity,” he wrote in the blog post.
Mr Marshall, who is British but has has lived in New York since 2013, gave an interview to Vulture magazine in which he said he was “Jew-ish”.
The topic arose after Mr Marshall revealed that he was taking comedy improvisation classes in the city’s Upright Citizens Brigade theatre and had recently performed a monologue at the venue.
Asked what his monologue involved, Marshall said: “I don’t know, exactly. It involved condoms and being Jewish.”