Newman said in an interview, "I didn't consider myself of a particular nationality;" in the United States, she felt like a "foreigner." During her holidays, she spent much of her vacation in Chile with her large extended family. Upon graduating high school, she studied journalism at the University of Chile in Santiago. After General Augusto Pinochet’s coup d'état on 11 September 1973, Newman discovered that her professors and colleagues started to vanish.