The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Sandy Hook families sue conspiracy theorist Jones
File lawsuit against Alex Jones, who claims Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax
NEWTOWN — The defamation lawsuit against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, brought by six families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook School shooting, is Newtown’s latest response in its yearslong battle against those who contend the shooting was a hoax.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Texas-based talk show host and others, brought by the six families and an FBI agent who investigated the 2012 shooting, follows a similar suit brought against Jones in April by two families who lost children in the worst crime in Connecticut history.
“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 loves ones that day are paid actors who faked their relatives’ deaths,” reads a statement released by the FBI agent and the six families. “Jones’ actions subjected the families and survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting to physical confrontations and harassment, death threats and personal attacks on social media.”
The agent and families are suing for unspecified damages, they said, because “Alex Jones and his co-conspirators engineered and maintained this campaign for a simple reason: greed.”
Jones did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
In April, Neil Heslin, the father of slain student Jesse Lewis, and Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of slain student Noah Pozner, each sued Jones for more than $1 million in damages for claiming, among other things, the murder of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook was “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors,” with “inside job written all over it.”
In Wednesday’s suit, families accuse Jones of saying, among other things, that: “It took me about a year with Sandy Hook to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing was fake. I mean, even I couldn’t believe it. I knew they jumped on it, used the crisis, hyped it up, but then I did deep research and, my gosh, it just pretty much didn’t happen.”
Jones is accused of defaming the families on his web-based program, InfoWars.
“While the nation recoiled at the terrible reality of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Alex Jones saw an opportunity,” said the families’ attorney, Josh Koskoff, in a prepared statement. “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 families are Jacqueline and Mark Barden, Nicole and Ian Hockley, Francine and David Wheeler, and Jennifer Hensel and Jeremy Richman — all who lost first-graders in the shooting. The other two families are Donna Soto, Carlee Soto-Parisi, Carlos Soto and Jillian Soto, who lost first-grade teacher Victoria Leigh Soto, and Erica Lafferty-Garbatini, who lost her mother, Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Hochsprung. William Aldenberg, an FBI agent and first responder, is also suing.
“(Jones) knew his claims were false, but he made them anyway to further a simple but pathetic goal: to make money by tearing away at the families’ pain,” Koskoff said. “This lawsuit seeks to hold Alex Jones and his financial network accountable for those disgraceful actions.”
Although Sandy Hook families have been harassed by lone extremists in the past, Jones became Newtown’s focus early last year after the election of Donald Trump, when Jones bragged that the new president had called to thank him for his support.
In response, the Newtown Board of Education wrote to Trump, asking him to “stop Jones and other hoaxers like him.”
The White House did not respond.
Jones made headlines again in June when he was booked to speak with Megyn Kelly on a prime-time Sunday night show. The nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise took the lead in calling for NBC to cancel the show to “keep Jones’ extremist views from gaining prime-time exposure.”
Sandy Hook Promise dropped Kelly as the emcee of its Washington, D.C., gala, but Jones went on as scheduled.
Koskoff, who is also representing 10 Sandy Hook families in a separate lawsuit against the maker of the rifle used in the shooting, said at the time that Jones had “weaponized his radio show.”
In June, a Florida woman named Lucy Richards was sentenced to five months in prison for threats to Pozner and Heslin that were linked to conspiracy theories circulated on Jones’ InfoWars show.