Anti-hate group analyzes Jones’ texts, compiles expose
Text messages from Alex Jones’ cellphone that were inadvertently sent to the last person Jones would have chosen during his Texas Sandy Hook defamation trial are now being used against him bya hate-fighting group that has prepared a five-part expose.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabamabased nonprofit racial justice group, said it reviewed 22,000 texts messages Jones sent in nine months between 2019 and 2020 to expose “the life of extremist entrepreneur Alex Jones and the destructive business he operates of selling bigotry and disinformation to people in America.”
Jones sent the text messages in question two years before his troubles truly started in late 2022 with the Sandy Hook families he defamed, when jury trials in Texas and Connecticut ordered him to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages. The text messages purportedly show “how dark it is inside the radical right movement,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
At one point a week before Christmas 2019, when a Texas judge was threatening him with monetary sanctions for an abuse of pretrial procedures, Jones texted his father “expressing fear and describing living in a ‘black hole,’” the nonprofit said in its report.
The outing of Jones’ private texts is the latest fallout from back-to-back jury trials in Texas and Connecticut at the end of 2022 as Jones was forced into personal bankruptcy. He was ordered to pay a total of nearly $1.5 billion to families he defamed when he called the 2012 slaying of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors.”
If it seems unlikely that Jones’ private text messages would end up in the hands of a nonprofit racial justice group that profiles him as “almost certainly the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America,” it is.
News that Jones’ private cellphone records had been turned over in error to the lawyer for the Sandy
Hook parents that Jones defamed was disclosed when Jones was on the stand during the explosive second week of the trial in August. The surprise revelation made national headlines.
“[Y]our attorneys messed up and sent m ea digital copy of every text,” Mark Bankston said to Jones. “When your attorneys sent me your whole phone, they didn’t mean to do that.”
Also in the digital file that Jones’ attorneys sent to Bankston in error were the confidential and courtorder-protected medical records of Sandy Hook families who successfully sued Jones for defamation in Connecticut.
The fallout of that inadvertent medical records disclosure is still felt in Connecticut, where Jones’ lawyer Norm Pattis was suspended from practicing law for six months for
his role in sharing the medical records with Jones’ attorneys who weren’t part of the Connecticut case.
Pattis won a temporary break that delays his suspension until his appeal is heard, freeing the New Haven lawyer to continue defending a member of the Proud Boys accused of sedition in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol at a trial that continues this week in Washington, D.C.
How did the Southern Poverty Law Center get Jones’ texts?
Bankston gave the nonprofit Jones’ texts in September on a “not-for-publication basis, to aid (its) mission of analyzing extremist networks,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
When Bankston filed a redacted portion of Jones’ texts as a court exhibit in late January, “the messages entered the public record, enabling the publication of this series.”
Bankston said Jones had the opportunity to protect the text messages but did not.
“Over the past week, on three separate occasions, my law firm invited Mr. Jones’ lawyers to obtain a sealing order under Texas Rule 76(a)(5) to protect any confidential information in that exhibit, which we did not oppose,” Bankston said. “For unknown reasons, Mr. Jones’ lawyers declined our offer and chose not to take any steps to prevent these messages from entering the public record.”