Two of the families who lost children in the Sandy Hook mass shooting are suing radio host Alex Jones and his website Infowars for defamation after becoming the target of internet conspiracy theorists.
Jones has been at the front of a small but loud group of conspiracy theorists who believe that the shooting was a staged “false flag” event, intended to push US public opinion toward increased gun control. “Undoubtedly, there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying, and they were pre-planning before it,” Jones said in a March 2014 broadcast.
A lawyer handling the cases for the parents described how the families have been traumatized in addition to their bereavement.
“Our clients have been tormented for five years by Mr Jones’s ghoulish accusations that they are actors who faked their children’s deaths as part of a fraud on the American people,” said Mark Bankston, lead attorney in the case. “Enough is enough.”
Neil Heslin, along with Leonard Pozner and his ex-wife Veronique De La Rosa, both families who lost six-year-old children, filed the suits early on Tuesday in Travis county, Texas, where Jones’s outlet is based. Each suit is seeking more than $1m in damages.
Jones has discussed Sandy Hook numerous times since the 2012 shooting saw 20 five- and six-year-old children killed in a Connecticut elementary school. In various segments Jones and other hosts on InfoWars, have accused the families of slain children of being paid actors, of lying and the media of staging coverage with green-screen video technology. Bankston contends that these claims have brought the families abuse and threats from Jones’s followers and listeners, who number in the tens of millions.
In one case, a Florida woman left threatening voicemails for Pozner which stated “you gonna die, death is coming to you real soon” and “Look behind you it is death.”
Also named in the suit is the Infowars reporter Owen Shroyer, for a segment where he accused Heslin of lying about his experiences, in a televised interview about Jones with Megyn Kelly in the summer of 2017. Shroyer suggested that, because news coverage had explained that the slain children were identified by photograph, Heslin must have been lying about having held his dead son in his arms. “You would remember if you held your dead kid in your hands with a bullet hole. That’s not something you would just misspeak on,” Shroyer said in the broadcast.
According to the suit, Shroyer’s alleged inconsistency is easily explained. The children were initially identified by photograph and the bodies were later transferred to the families for funeral arrangements.
“In all our years of helping families who have lost loved ones under horrific circumstances, we have never seen victims subjected to this kind of malicious cruelty,” Bankston said.
The suit is the third such defamation filing against Jones and InfoWars in the span of just over a month. Bankston is also representing a Boston man whose photo was falsely identified as that of the Parkland school shooter by Jones and InfoWars in February. Jones is also being sued by plaintiffs related to the deadly 2017 Charlottesville attack at a white supremacist rally.
Neither Jones, Shroyer or InfoWars immediately responded to a request for comment.
