Jones’ identities, Info warrior and father, did battle at trial
Crossover of the two may have helped exwife win joint custody.
At an April 12 pretrial hearing, state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo said she wouldn’t allow the jury at an upcoming child custody trial to watch a recent Infowars video in which Alex Jones, in an obscene, gay-bashing rant, threatened U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, because the judge didn’t want the trial to be about Infowars or politics.
Lawyers for Alex Jones’ ex-wife Kelly Jones had argued that the tape, seen by Jones’ vast audience, revealed the judgment and temperament of a man who they said was the same on air and at home.
Yet Kelly Jones won joint custody of their three children, ages 9, 12 and 14 late Thursday night — for the first time since the Joneses’ 2015 divorce, the children will be making their home with her instead of her ex-husband — despite Naranjo’s reluctance to let Infowars and Alex Jones’ blustering and conspiracy-drenched on-air persona become part of the case.
Alex Jones failed to convince the Travis County jury of his parenting bona fides, at least in part because Jones brought elements of his Infowars persona with him into the courtroom, and in what seemed a reckless bit of timing, divulged some information in an Infowars broadcast
midway through the trial that Naranjo, despite her reluctance, was unable to keep from the jury.
“When I was 16, I didn’t want to party any more. I didn’t want to play games anymore,” Jones said on a video posted a week ago, halfway through the trial. “I grew up. I’d already been in the fights, all the big rituals. I’d already had probably — I hate to brag, but I’m not bragging, it’s actually shameful — probably 150 women, or more, that’s conservative. I’d already had over 150 women.”
The on-air persona
It was not the first time that Jones had said things on the air that seemed to tempt fate so close to the trial. The Schiff diatribe, which he later said was “tongue in cheek,” came only weeks earlier. On the Friday before the trial opened, he said on the air that President Barack Obama’s daughters weren’t his own.
And, while Kelly Jones rose to the occasion in her testimony, appearing calm and poised despite what the jury had been told about her tendency toward “emotional dysregulation” — defined as an episodic tendency to respond in a manner and with an intensity out of proportion to the circumstances — the Alex Jones who took the stand appeared jittery, defensive, quick to anger and much the man that Kelly Jones’ attorneys over and over described as a diagnosed narcissist.
When one of his ex-wife’s attorneys asked Alex Jones to describe Kelly Jones’ good qualities as a mother, Jones stared straight at his ex-wife, paused, thought about it and, said, “I cannot perjure myself. She doesn’t have any good qualities.”
In between court sessions, Jones was back on Infowars attacking the press for assassinating his character, and asserting that the views he expresses on the air are no act, though they are sometimes satire that his critics are too dim to grasp. If his lawyers had planned to separate Infowars Alex Jones from the actual person and parent Alex Jones, he made it hard on them.
Assailing the media
On Friday afternoon, 18 hours after the verdict, Alex Jones held a half hour post-trial news conference in front of the downtown Austin courthouse where the trial took place, blaming the “vampires” of the media from intruding on his privacy to cover, or miscover, the trial.
He said that he had never sought the divorce or to be the custodial parent.
He was fine with sharing custody and Naranjo, whom he described as an outstanding jurist in an impressive family court system, would iron out the details of their new joint custody — in which the children live with his ex-wife instead of him.
But he said, you would never know any of this from reading the biased, fiction-writing media — who he said only failed to blame him for shooting Abraham Lincoln and sinking the Lusitania — but that was OK because Infowars’ viewership, which was already high, was now higher.
He brought his buttoned-down attorney before the camera, who spoke a few words and made a hasty exit.
And then, he was attacking the press for not taking seriously the nightmare lives of human-animal chimeras, and when a TV camera operator smirked, he turned the Infowars camera on the cameraman, demanding to know what was so funny about the cruel fate of chimeras.
He was asked why he had brought up having sex with 150 women as an adolescent when he was trying to keep custody of his 14-year-old son, and he replied that it was “taken out of context.”
He was asked why he had said Obama’s daughters weren’t his own, and he said “that was a joke,” and that the media also missed the joke when he said last year, “I think Michelle Obama is a man.”
By the end of the press conference it was hard to remember that it was all about the kids or where the Infowars Alex Jones ended and the father Alex Jones began.