The Sandy Hook families leveraged personal stories, social media analysis and the Infowars fabulist’s lack of contrition to secure a major verdict.
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Alex Jones faces financial ruin after a jury awarded the families who had sued him almost $1 billion, though it is unclear how much money the families will ultimately collect.
WATERBURY, Conn. — The families of eight Sandy Hook shooting victims on Wednesday won nearly $1 billion in damages from the Infowars fabulist Alex Jones, a devastating blow against his empire and a message from the jury that his lies and those of his followers have crippling consequences.
Mr. Jones, who for years said the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn., was a government hoax, now faces financial ruin. But it is unclear how much money the families will ultimately collect.
The families and their lawyers sat in stunned silence as the court clerk read one by one the sums awarded to each of 15 plaintiffs in the case. After court was adjourned, they hugged one another quietly, weeping.
The largest award went to Robbie Parker, who received $120 million. For years on his Infowars show and website, Mr. Jones singled out Mr. Parker, whose daughter Emilie died at Sandy Hook, as an actor whose televised tribute to Emilie a day after her death was “disgusting.”
Mr. Parker, who has endured online abuse, harassment and death threats since, formed the centerpiece of the Connecticut case. “Every day in that courtroom, we got up on the stand and we told the truth,” he said. “Telling the truth shouldn’t be so hard, and it shouldn’t be so scary.”
Mr. Parker added, in a nod to Mr. Jones’s followers, “For anybody that still chooses to listen to that man, just ask yourself, what has he ever given you?”
In all likelihood Mr. Jones does not have the money to pay Wednesday’s award. In August a forensic economist estimated that Mr. Jones’s empire was worth a maximum of $270 million, but that same month Mr. Jones put his parent company, Free Speech Systems, into bankruptcy. Mr. Jones claimed that a debt of $54 million — owed to a company he controls — had made him insolvent.
But Mr. Jones’s annual revenues have topped $50 million in recent years from hawking diet supplements, survivalist gear and gun paraphernalia on his broadcasts. He has also used the Connecticut trial as well as a trial this past summer in Texas — in which he was ordered to pay two Sandy Hook parents about $50 million — to solicit donations to his legal fund and boost his product sales.
The Sandy Hook families have challenged the bankruptcy in court, saying the filing is an effort to avoid paying what are mounting damages awards.
Mr. Jones, unrepentant, livestreamed the jury’s verdict on Wednesday on his Infowars show. “They covered up what really happened, and now I’m the devil,” he said. “I’m actually proud to be under this level of attack.”
Wednesday’s award was divided among the 15 plaintiffs in the Connecticut case, which included parents, siblings, children and spouses of eight victims, and an F.B.I. agent who was implicated in the bogus theories, which falsely claimed that the families were actors in a government plot to enact gun control and that the massacre never happened.
Over two weeks of testimony in the Connecticut trial, the families showed how Mr. Jones ignored years of pleas and demands that he stop airing Sandy Hook falsehoods because they boosted Infowars’s product sales. In court, the witnesses shared wrenching stories of harassment by conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s lies, including death and rape threats, confrontations and messages threatening to defile and dig up the victims’ graves. The jury also heard Mr. Jones’s explosive and evasive testimony and saw data demonstrating the theories’ extensive online reach.
Until he joined the lawsuit in late 2018, Mr. Parker had remained silent about the abuse his family had received from people who believed Mr. Jones’s lies, out of fears of encouraging them. The night after the shooting, Mr. Parker agreed to meet what he thought would be one reporter to deliver a statement about his daughter. Confronted instead with a sea of cameras, he gave a short, shocked laugh that Mr. Jones replayed for years, mocking Mr. Parker and igniting a torrent of death threats and abuse from conspiracy theorists who believed he was acting.
ImageRobbie Parker was singled out by Mr. Jones for years on his Infowars show and website, where the opening seconds of Mr. Parker’s televised tribute to his daughter Emilie were replayed.Credit…Michelle Mcloughlin/Reuters
He and Emilie’s mother, Alissa Parker, both testified in the trial. Mrs. Parker described a “full-on assault” by hoaxers and her terror that they would disrupt Emilie’s funeral. Mr. Parker found Mrs. Parker cowering in a closet before the service.
During his testimony, Mr. Parker described a 2016 episode in which he was accosted in Seattle — four years and thousands of miles away from the massacre — by a man who launched a profanity-laced tirade, asking Mr. Parker how much money he had made from the government for faking his daughter’s death at Sandy Hook.
In mid-2018, the families of 10 victims filed four separate defamation lawsuits against Mr. Jones, later combined into three. Beyond stopping Mr. Jones, the families said the lawsuits aimed to draw attention to an explosion of harmful disinformation and false narratives spread by people with powerful social media platforms who were seldom held to account.
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Once an obscure conspiracy broadcaster in Austin, Texas, Mr. Jones garnered national attention in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, when his explosive defense of the Second Amendment brought him mainstream media coverage.
His staunch support for former President Donald J. Trump, who appeared on Mr. Jones’s show while a Republican candidate for president, ushered Mr. Jones from the extremist fringe to the center of Trump-era Republican politics.
He has had a role in spreading virtually every incendiary lie to dominate headlines over the past decade, including Pizzagate, the false claim that Democrats trafficked children from a Washington pizzeria; the “great replacement theory” that ignited deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Va.; Covid vaccine lies; and the 2020 presidential election falsehoods that brought a violent mob to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Today, nearly one-fifth of Americans believe high-profile mass shootings have been staged, usually by the government.
Mr. Jones is now under scrutiny by the Justice Department and the House Jan. 6 committee for his role in planning events adjacent to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, which he broadcast live.
Mr. Jones for years refused to supply analytical data, business records or testimony ordered by the courts in the lawsuits, which were filed in Texas, where Infowars is based, and the current one in Connecticut. Late last year judges in both states ruled him liable by default, granting the families a sweeping victory that set the current damages trials in motion.
“Just to get to a trial in front of a jury is a huge accomplishment, given the extreme measures Alex Jones has taken to try to avoid that,” said Alinor Sterling, a lawyer on the families’ legal team. “His attack on these families has been a dehumanizing attack, and one of the ways to restore a sense of balance and community and humanity is to try this case in front of a jury.”
A third and final damages trial — in a defamation case brought by Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook — is tentatively scheduled for late this year, but the date has not been set.
Mr. Jones began denying Sandy Hook and targeting the families hours after the shooting, but his falsehoods did not garner widespread scrutiny until the lawsuits were filed. Even Piers Morgan, who waged a televised crusade for stricter gun legislation in the immediate aftermath of Sandy Hook as a CNN host, did not ask Mr. Jones about his Sandy Hook theories during Mr. Jones’s interview on his show.
In the Connecticut trial, lawyers for the families used forensic analyses of web traffic, Infowars internal communications and Google Analytics data — which Mr. Jones and his lawyer, Norm Pattis, had falsely claimed during discovery that Infowars didn’t use — to demonstrate how audience sales skyrocketed when he talked about Sandy Hook.
Mr. Jones, who flew with his entourage to Waterbury by private jet, stayed in a rented villa with a pool and tennis court. He declined to show up for most of the trial.
He spent most of his brief time in Connecticut outside the courthouse, falsely claiming the lawsuits were a “deep state” effort to silence him. In truth, he forfeited his ability to claim First Amendment protection for his lies by failing to provide court-ordered records and testimony during discovery.
The judge barred Mr. Jones or his lawyer from speaking about politics or his finances in court. In the earlier trial in Austin, Mr. Jones was admonished by the judge for falsely claiming he was bankrupt.
Mr. Jones’s single day of testimony in Connecticut was explosive, as he drew frowns from some jurors by loudly proclaiming his lack of contrition.
Mr. Pattis, his lawyer, was repeatedly admonished by the judge during the litigation for mishandling the families’ personal information and testimony, injecting politics into the proceedings, including by mounting an effort to subpoena Hillary Clinton, and disparaging the families’ lawyers to the jury, calling them “in it for the money.”
During the trial Mr. Pattis suggested the families were exaggerating the harm done to them by Mr. Jones.
During his time on the stand, Mr. Jones viewed Mr. Parker’s full news conference, watching a video of Mr. Parker reminiscing about his daughter’s art skills, her empathy as a sister and friend and the Parker family’s compassion for the family of the gunman.
“Robbie Parker’s sitting right here,” Christopher M. Mattei, a lawyer for the families, told Mr. Jones. “He’s real, isn’t he? And for years you put a target on his back, didn’t you? Just like you did every single parent and loved one sitting here.”
“Is this a struggle session? Are we in China?” Mr. Jones said, a comment echoed by Mr. Pattis, as the families in the gallery wept.
“I’ve already said I’m sorry, and I’m done saying I’m sorry,” Mr. Jones said.
Emily Steel contributed reporting from New York.
Source: nytimes.com
