Six families of victims killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School won a legal victory today in their fight against controversial radio and internet personality Alex Jones.
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 families sued Jones and InfoWars for defamation and accused him of perpetuating a “monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.”
Jones has sought to dismiss the lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs suffered a horrible tragedy,” his defense attorney, Jay M. Wolman, wrote in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. “Alex Jones and InfoWars are not responsible for this tragedy. To punish them for First Amendment protected speech on this matter of public concern will not bring back the lives lost.”
The judge’s ruling on discovery gives the plaintiffs access to any communication Jones had about the Newtown massacre and to documents that could point to the inner workings of InfoWars.
The plaintiffs — families of four children and two educators killed in the December 2012 shooting — have said the “deeply painful” lies they’ve accused Jones of pushing have caused them to endure “malicious and cruel abuse” as well as harassment and death threats on social media.
Jones, an online conspiracy theorist whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, seized on this agonizing recollection to repeat the bizarre falsehood that the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six adults at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”
More broadly, the families are seeking society’s verdict on “post truth” culture in which widely disseminated lies damage lives and destroy reputations, yet those who spread them are seldom held accountable.
The suit emphasizes Jones’s reach and connection to President Trump.
On his show last year, Jones called himself and his listeners “the operating system of Trump.”
Later he said, “I’m making it safe for everybody else to speak out just like Trump’s doing, on a much bigger scale.”
When Trump called the news media the “enemy of the people” last year, Jones proudly tweeted that he used the phrase first, in 2015.
Trump has also echoed InfoWars’ false claims that Hillary Clinton benefited from the votes of millions of illegal immigrants in the election, and repeated InfoWars’ bogus charge that the news media covers up terrorist attacks.
