Members of six victims’ families of the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook massacre event in addition to FBI agent Bill Aldenberg have filed a defamation lawsuit in Connecticut Superior Court naming radio host Alex Jones and well-known Sandy Hook Truth activist Wolfgang Halbig as defendants. The suit seeks damages “in excess of $15,000.”
The lawsuit accuses Jones, a staunch gun rights advocate who operates Infowars, a website that routinely propagates conspiracies, of “a years-long campaign of abusive and outrageous false statements.”
“While the nation recoiled at the terrible reality of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Alex Jones saw an opportunity,” the families’ attorney Josh Koskoff said. “He went on a sustained attack that has lasted for years, accusing shattered family members of being actors, stating as fact that the shooting itself was a hoax and inciting others to act on these malicious lies.”
The plaintiffs are the parents of four children killed at Sandy Hook — Jacqueline and Mark Barden, parents of Daniel; Nicole and Ian Hockley, parents of Dylan; Francine and David Wheeler, parents of Ben; and Jennifer Hensel and Jeremy Richman, parents of Avielle — as well as Donna Soto, Carlee Soto-Parisi, Carlos Soto and Jillian Soto, the mother and siblings of first-grade teacher Victoria Leigh Soto; and Erica Lafferty-Garbatini, the daughter of Sandy Hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung. FBI agent Bill Aldenberg is also a plaintiff.
“As a result of Jones’ campaign,” the families and Aldenberg said they have been “forced to endure malicious and cruel abuse at the hands of ruthless unscrupulous people.”
Their lawsuit also names Wolfgang Halbig, a Florida man who founded the now-defunct website SandyHookJustice, his associate Cory Sklanka and Infowars itself.
The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Bridgeport, cites Jones’ public assertions, including one from Sept. 25, 2014, in which he said video from the day of the shooting showed that the same children were cycled in and out of the school and that no emergency helicopters were sent to the school, and were “clearly staged.”
The lawsuit quotes Jones as saying on Jan. 13, 2015, “Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured.”
The plaintiffs called such statements, among others, “outrageous, deeply painful and defamatory.”
Connecticut allows for libel and defamation actions to be brought “within two years of the date of the act complained of.” The lawsuit cites statements made by Jones in 2014 and 2015, suggesting the suit may in fact be dead on arrival. It will nevertheless generate substantial news coverage for the parties bringing the action.
Jones and his broadcast enterprises were named as defendants in another lawsuit filed by two other sets of Sandy Hook parents last month in Texas.
Editor’s Note: In our view this is not a terribly surprising development. As we have recently noted here, whether it is a matter of being compromised himself or playing the role of an agent provocateur in the Truth community to short circuit research efforts for “the other side,” Jones has been consistently inconsistent and even misleading in statements and analyses of numerous complex events, only one of which is the Newtown Connecticut school massacre. Perhaps this is why an increasing number of his fans and even employees have walked away from “Operation Infowars.”
Instead of attacking the Sandy Hook parents who are bringing a lawsuit against him for defamation–because he has (from time to time) asserted that Sandy Hook was fake and that no children died (which implies that they are BIG TIME liars and frauds)–he has wimped out by making an appeal to pity, which is the elementary fallacy of using the unfortunate consequences of something being true as though it were proof that it’s actually false! He’s not going to get away with it–but why even try?
Sensing weakness–since truth is an absolute defense against defamation, but Alex is not arguing that his observations about Sandy Hook fakery are true–Lenny Pozner and Neil Heslin are not going to back down, even though they are (in the process) opening themselves up to discovery, which would provide an opportunity to establish the fact of Sandy Hook as an elaborate charade in a court of law. Neil Heslin, for example, longs for “a knock-down, drag out fight”, which Alex ought to give him:
As it happens, I have been sending Infowars.com contacts, including Jerry Corsi, samples of proof that it was a staged event–a two-day FEMA exercise, with a rehearsal on the 13th, going LIVE on the14th–but received a cordial dismissal from Corsi and passive reception from others there–which is rather astonishing, since we have proven that the school was closed by 2008 and there were no students there. I recently made a summary overview of the history of research on Sandy Hook:
In this debut of the MemoryHoleBlog’s news analysis and commentary video series we examine the lawsuits filed against Alex Jones and Infowars’ parent company on April 16, 2018.
In 2017 when Jones was sued by James Alefantis over “Pizzagate” the broadcaster settled out of court and agreed to never use the term again, thus leading the way in chilling investigation and commentary on the scandal. Will the public witness the same tactic used in responding to suits filed by Sandy Hook massacre victims’ families?
On February 12 2015 alternative media personality Alex Jones mused how Lenny Pozner might have been behind an elaborate plan to “shut down” his alternative news outlet’s YouTube channels. Jones vigorously advocated for free speech, arguing that Pozner was using copyright as a means to undermine his organization’s (overall tentative) journalistic
inquiries on how the image of Sandy Hook victim Noah Pozner appeared in mass mediated photos of public mournings following the December 2014 mass shooting in Peshawar Pakistan.
This is “a reign of terror on free speech,” Jones fumed.
If they can do this to us they can do it to anybody. This copyright notification, if successful, will take down the [Alex Jones Youtube] channel, and already we’re unable to upload over 15 minute videos and are in what they call probation–guilty until proven innocent right now … And, again, if they can do this to us they can do this to anybody … The H-O-N-R or “honor” Network, Lenny Pozner, who reportedly lost his son there, came in and filed a copyright claim for us showing a BBC news article. You can’t do that. For those who don’t know how copyright works …
Hot n’heavy Jones characteristically proceeded to lecture the audience on the intricacies of copyright law, offering various examples from his alleged experiences fighting against such censorship. Yet as YouTube researcher MattyD4Truth observes in the video below, Jones never revisited the attack in subsequent programs.
In this debut of the MemoryHoleBlog’s news analysis and commentary video series we examine the lawsuits filed against Alex Jones and Infowars’ parent company on April 16, 2018.