Defense argues Jones’ remarks on Newtown not defamatory
AUSTIN — After playing an April 2017 tape of Alex Jones conflating lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with his doubts about the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Jones’ attorney acknowledged that most of those who packed the Austin courtroom Wednesday might fault the famed conspiracy theorist’s reasoning.
“Maybe it’s fringe speech, maybe it’s dangerous speech,” attorney Mark Enoch said. But he said, “That is not defamation, that’s rhetorical hyperbole at its core.”
“It’s what they expect when they tune in,” Enoch said of Jones’ vast radio and online audience.
Enoch, a Dallas attorney who said he knew nothing about Jones before he became a client, was arguing before state District Judge Scott Jenkins that he should dismiss the million-dollar defamation lawsuit brought by Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of a child who was killed in the Connecticut school shooting that Jones, over the years, had suggested was a hoax.
Houston attorney Mark Bankston brought the defamation suit against Jones, one of three he has brought in Austin against the broadcaster who in the 2016 presidential campaign gained the ear and favorable attention of President Donald Trump. Bankston said Jones presents his opinions as facts and that’s how some listeners, including a Florida woman who in 2016 was sent to prison for death threats against the Pozner family, take them. “We cannot allow his reckless lies to continue to put their lives in danger,” Bankston said.
Jenkins recessed and asked the attorneys to make any additions to the written record he will use to decide whether to dismiss the plaintiff ’s motion.
Once he receives all the documents, Jenkins has 30 days to render a judgment.
At issue is whether Jones is in some manner a journalist — and thus responsible for backing up what he contends are facts with evidence — or a polemicist whose every rant is protected speech under the First Amendment. In the tape played by his attorney, Jones insisted, “Everything I say is documented … we’re so real, they say we’re fake.”
Jones’ central claim, repeated in the April 2017 broadcast, is that CNN host Anderson Cooper’s interview with De La Rosa after the Sandy Hook shooting was not actually conducted in Newtown, Conn., as it was purported to be, but rather in a studio in front of a blue screen presenting an image of Newtown.
But in an affidavit on behalf of the plaintiffs, Grant Fredericks, a certified forensic video analyst, concludes that Cooper’s disappearing nose was a consequence of post-production compression, not the use of a blue screen, and that the anomaly Jones observed does not appear on a higher quality version of the interview that has been publicly available on YouTube since April 24, 2013.
The Austin case is one of five defamation cases — three in Texas, and one each in Connecticut and Virginia — that attorneys for Jones are seeking to have thrown out of court as frivolous infringements on his First Amendment rights.
Lawyers representing Jones will be back in court in Austin on Thursday to argue that another case should be thrown out. Marcel Fontaine sued Alex Jones and Kit Daniels, an InfoWars editor, claiming that in the hours after the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., InfoWars published a photograph of Fontaine erroneously identifying him as the Parkland shooter.