A judge in Connecticut has granted the families’ discovery requests, allowing them access to, among other things, Infowars’ internal marketing and financial documents.
The judge has scheduled a hearing next week to decide whether to allow the plaintiffs’ attorneys to depose Jones.
The plaintiffs include the parents of five children who went to the school as well as family members of first-grade teacher Victoria Leigh Soto and Principal Dawn Hochsprung, according to a statement from the plaintiff’s attorneys.
According to the statement, the plaintiffs allege a “years-long campaign of abusive and outrageous false statements in which Jones and the other defendants have developed, amplified and perpetuated claims that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and that the 26 families who lost loved ones that day are paid actors who faked their relative’s deaths.”
A video outtake from one of Alex Jones’ recent broadcasts may suggest one of the ways the popular radio host may have been compromised.
The excerpt, which shows Jones promoting one of his recent health-related phone apps, depicts him inadvertently revealing on his smart phone a still image and link to a hardcore transvestite porn video.
Can someone so Janus faced and with such apparent prurient interests be entrusted to carry forth the banner defending free speech? To what degree is Jones blackmailed via such obsessions? Is this perhaps one of the reasons why Jones can’t seem to get so many the story straight on so many false flag incidents?
On his August 29 broadcast Jones denied that he was viewing pornography on his telephone.
How a Talk Show Host Can Help Defeat the First Amendment
By James F. Tracy
Beginning in April the parents of children said to have perished in the December 2012 Sandy Hook School massacre have filed defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones (e.g. here, here and here) and others claiming the radio talk show host defamed them by repeatedly stating to his audience that the incident was staged. The plaintiffs are requesting an unspecified monetary sum from the defendant, claiming he caused them to be harassed and threatened by parties who share Jones belief that the event was a hoax.
In the event these actions are tried they will in all probability not function as a venue where the veracity of the Sandy Hook event itself can be verified or disproven. Nor will the plaintiffs likely have to provide much if any evidence of harassment or pain and suffering.
The parents’ attorneys assert in one suit that “overwhelming–and indisputable–evidence exists showing what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.” This claim is unanimously (though erroneously) supported by Connecticut State authorities and national news media, and has been accepted as settled fact by a federal judge in Lucyv.Richards.
An open question remains whether the suing parties would need to suppress any countervailing evidence. This is largely because over five years after the Sandy Hook massacre event Jones still routinely exhibits uncertainty on whether or not the shooting was real. It is with this suggestion of “actual malice” that he is setting himself up for an untenable position before a jury.
Sullivanv.NewYorkTimes defined actual malice as a primary requisite for a plaintiff to prevail in bringing a defamation suit. In that famous episode the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an advertisement with factual inaccuracies produced by 1960s civil rights advocates and carried in the Times had not been published with actual malice. The court ruled that under the given circumstances the newspaper’s staff did not run the ad either 1) knowing it was false, or 2) with reckless disregard for the truth.
In the cases at hand Jones’ would-be confusion about Sandy Hook began just hours after the alleged shooting itself, when Jones, perhaps anticipating the mixed orientation of his audience toward the incident, expressed confusion over exactly what took place in Newtown. At the same time, and without any real evidence, he used anonymous callers’ observations to label the event a probable “false flag.” This ambiguity would continue for more than five years.
In the months and years thereafter substantial evidence emerged suggesting the “massacre” was probably a FEMA drill overseen by the Obama administration and presented as an actual attack to lay the groundwork for strengthening gun control legislation. Some of this data was compiled in the book edited by Professor Jim Fetzer, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.
Instead of inviting Fetzer on to his radio program following the book’s publication and subsequent censorship by Amazon.com in late 2015, Jones ran in the other direction, actually deleting a story by Infowars writer Adan Salazar from his website and thus in effect joining forces with Amazon to suppress that title’s revelations.
Jones conflicted stance toward Sandy Hook is now even mirrored in his attorney Marc Randazza’s public remarks. “We are going to be mounting a strong First Amendment defense and look forward to this being resolved in a civil and collegial manner,” Jones’ counsel Randazza explained to the New York Times, where he continues to note “that Mr. Jones has ‘a great deal of compassion for these parents.'”
Such a statement suggests how the Sandy Hook official narrative as defined by the media (and in the minds of any potential jury member) is shared by the defendant himself and his own legal team.
University of Texas law professor David Anderson contends that Jones’ repeated waffling on Sandy Hook makes him especially vulnerable.
What I understand is that he’ll say these things at one point, and then later on, he’ll say, “Of course I know that wasn’t true.” If he says things, and then says he knows it wasn’t true, he’s in trouble. If he consistently says, “I never claimed that to be true,” then he’s probably on more solid ground.
Because Jones’ confusing array of broadcast utterances on Sandy Hook are all a matter of public record it will not be difficult for the “prosecution” to demonstrate Jones’ confusion amounts to a “reckless disregard for truth.”
Further, since Jones’ public persona precedes him and given the fact that jurors are often impressionable and will surely not be avid “Infowarriors,” plaintiffs’ counsel will likely find it easy to depict Jones as a devious and malicious actor. Unfortunately, these are all a jury needs to be fed to affirm the parents’ claims.
Jones’ uncertainty on the Sandy Hook massacre is especially unusual for a figure who is the self-proclaimed “founding father of the 9/11 truth movement,” and who for over two decades been the country’s most prominent “conspiracy theorist.”
Moreover, Jones strongly-voiced political opinions in many areas is what his fans find most appealing. In light of this the broadcaster has waffled so much on Sandy Hook that it’s difficult not to believe that he isn’t a pre-designated foil in a broader play to defeat what’s left of speech freedoms in the United States. It’s at least for certain that Jones is not any truth movement’s most desirable ally.
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?
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.