Alex Jones facing four suits over ‘fake news’
Suits say targets of Jones’ programs were private individuals.
The parents of children killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., have filed suit against Alex Jones and InfoWars for suggesting the death of their children was a “hoax,” setting the stage for what could be a landmark Austin trial on where to draw the line between free speech and libel in the era of fake news.
“We’re not settling; everything is going to come out,” Bill Ogden, one of the Houston attorneys who filed two suits Monday on behalf of Sandy Hook parents, told the American-Statesman on Tuesday. “There’s not a financial interest in filing these lawsuits. It’s personal.”
“We have filed for in excess of $1 million in damages, but we’re going to let the great citizens of Travis County, Texas, decide the actual number to show the consequences of Mr. Jones’ actions,” Ogden said of the lawsuits filed on behalf of Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin, Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa.
“The good news is these lawsuits are very frivolous and have huge problems,” Jones, who broadcasts daily to a vast radio, TV and internet audience from his Austin studios, said on his show Tuesday. “The problem is they’re filing them in Democrat-controlled places — Travis County indicts Rick Perry for no reason.”
But, he warned, “You sue somebody for defamation it’s a big twoway street — bank records and
everything and then the PIs (private investigators) can go out and do everything.”
Jones, who started his broadcast career on local cable access TV in Austin, now reaches millions as the country’s best-known conspiracy theorist as host of InfoWars, a multimillion-dollar operation.
“They think they will have enough George Soros-financed lawsuits so that, at the end of it, we won’t be here,” Jones said, referring to the liberal philanthropist and political funder. “In the digital age, we’ll always be here, and you’ll never be able to no-platform us. We’re bigger than ever — our listeners, the most amount of affiliates. The amount of new TV stations, radio stations, are up. They all know this is a hoax. They all know this is a fraud.”
University of Texas law professor David Anderson said that because the plaintiffs are private and not public figures, “I would think that these people have a pretty good case.”
As long as what Jones said is not just him stating an opinion, or obvious satire, Anderson said, “it is actionable.”
‘Beyond a weak suit’
The two lawsuits come on the heels of two other recent defamation lawsuits filed against Jones.
At the start of April, the same Houston law firm — Kaster Lynch Farrar & Ball — filed a lawsuit in Travis County for more than $1 million on behalf of Marcel Fontaine. The suit contends that InfoWars used an image of Fontaine that portrayed him as the shooter who killed 17 students and staffers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February. Fontaine, who lives in Massachusetts, had nothing to do with the shooting.
The second suit was filed on behalf of Brennan Gilmore, who took cellphone photos he shared with police and on social media of the death of Heather Heyer, a counterprotester at last year’s neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. The suit alleges that InfoWars claimed Gilmore, on leave from the Foreign Service, was an undercover CIA office who helped stage the attack.
Gilmore told The Washington Post that he sued because of “the broader implications of the new era of the saturation of these fake news outlets. There’s no money that would be offered in a settlement that would make me drop the suit.”
“This case is just like the others,” Jones told the Statesman before going on the air Tuesday, referring to the new suits.
“For years I have been very, very clear that I think Sandy Hook happened, but that there was PR involved and CNN and others basically didn’t want to let a good crisis go to waste,” Jones said. “So the charges in the lawsuit aren’t anything that I ever said and are definitely past the statute of limitations. So, I don’t know if the families know that but clearly, by the lawyers it’s clearly just another anti-Alex Jones, anti-free-speech PR stunt.
“You know how the media say I said they were crisis actors at Parkland, and I said, no, they were scripted after the fact, picked because they were anti-gun spokespersons, but the mainstream media will never let me say what I’m actually saying,” Jones told the Statesman. “They have edited clips where I play devil’s advocate. So it’s all just part of the concerted effort to shut me down, and they sent us letters — this is the big news — last week and said they wanted us to retract and apologize. Well, we were going to send them a correction letter saying we never said these things in these videos you list, but they already filed before that.
“It’s beyond a weak suit,” he said.
A previous apology
Ogden said the one-year statute of limitations had not passed because Jones had reiterated some of the comments in the last year.
The Sandy Hook parents had not sued earlier because, Ogden said, “the last thing they wanted to do was this. They didn’t want the media coverage. They didn’t want it to blow up like this because they wanted to grieve and they wanted to be left alone, and they thought ignoring him would work, and it didn’t, so that’s when they called us.”
Ogden did not divulge the financial arrangement the firm had made with plaintiffs to pay for the case but said that Soros was not involved.
Jones referred to Ogden’s law firm as “the exploding tire lawyers” and the “crème da la crème of the vaunted ambulance chasers.”’
“Our bread and butter are tire cases, and we are very good at them,” Ogden said.
Lawsuits have brought Jones to heel in the past.
Last year, Jones settled a lawsuit with the yogurt company Chobani and retracted claims about its employees.
And in May 2017, he apologized on air for his role in spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory alleging a child sex ring with links to Hillary Clinton in the nonexistent basement of a popular Washington, D.C., pizzeria. A subdued Jones read a six-minute statement on the air that ended, “We encourage you to hold us accountable. We improve when you do.” Contact Jonathan Tilove at 512-445-3572.