(JTA) — Days after a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against a political commentator who had disparaged a famous rabbi, Candace Owens identified herself as the victim.
In early September, Owens, a far-right pundit, derided Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. The comments, made during a TV debate with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, were part of Owens’ recent embrace of antisemitic rhetoric, which has also included Holocaust denial and praise of high-profile antisemitic voices.
Less than a week after she made the comments about Schneerson, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, Haim Braverman, 47, of Morris Plains, New Jersey, posted a video to social media threatening Owens’ life.
In the video, Braverman held a steel bat and said, “I’ll give you the steel bat. I wouldn’t even stop. I’d kill you.” He continued, “I’m threatening a death sentence” against the victim. The US attorney’s office said he was angry about the commentator’s statements about a “prominent, now-deceased rabbi whom Braverman respected.”
Braverman was one of the administrators of a group chat called “Real Jewish,” according to the criminal complaint. A screenshot of the video where he threatens Owens shows him wearing a kippah. His sentencing is scheduled for September 15, 2025.
In a post on X Tuesday, Owens said that she was the victim of Braverman’s threats and had been contacted by the FBI. She said that following her comments about Schneerson in the debate, which was on Piers Morgan’s talk show, her family “endured a series of attacks led by deranged zionists.”
“Haim wanted to murder me because of my @piersmorgan debate against Shmuley. Bc I offended the dead Rabbi Menachem Schneerson who many Jews viewed as a messiah,” wrote Owens in a post on X. “Haim was unequivocal that he was willing to serve time in prison for killing me.”
Candace's continuous tweets about Jewish people
In the days since that thread, Owens has continued tweeting about Jews, including suggesting that the Auschwitz concentration camp site’s website is “engaging in Holocaust denial.”
She posted a link to a podcast on the site discussing myths surrounding Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments with twins. In fact, the website says elsewhere that Mengele subjected the twins “to all imaginable specialist medical examinations… As soon as these examinations were finished, they were killed with lethal injections.”