For years, Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and founder of the website InfoWars, has long been claiming that the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting played a role in the massacre. Now, the parents of two of these children have filed defamation lawsuits against Jones and one of his contributors, as Gizmodo reports.
The Sandy Hook massacre remains one of the deadliest shootings in US history. According to CNN, on December 14th, 2012, “Twenty students, ages 6 and 7, and six adults were killed at the school.” The gunman also killed his mother prior to carrying out these attacks.
In one of InfoWars’ broadcasts, Jones described the parents of the Sandy Hook victims, stating, “So here are these holier than thou people, when we question CNN, who is supposedly at the site of Sandy Hook, and they got in one shot leaves blowing, and the flowers that are around it, and you see the leaves blowing, and they go [gestures]. They glitch. They’re recycling a green-screen behind them.”
Alex Jones was sued on Tuesday by three parents whose children were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. It’s the first legal action taken against Jones for the false claims he has made about Sandy Hook. https://t.co/c5IGPnTBpt
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) April 17, 2018
The other lawsuit claims that Jones and Shroyer said that Heslin lied about holding his son’s body in his hands “with a bullet hole through his head.” Jones and Shroyer falsely claimed that the parents had not been allowed to see the bodies of their children.
Gizmodo obtained court documents that allege that “Jones repeatedly spread malicious claims that the parents were part of a conspiracy to fabricate the “narrative” around the shooting.” One of these lawsuits was filed by Veronique de la Rosa and Leonard Pozner, whose six-year-old son, Noah Pozner, was killed in the attack. Another lawsuit filed by Neil Heslin, whose six-year-old son Jessie Heslin was killed.
The plaintiffs attorney in this case is Mark Bankston of Farrar & Ball, who filed another lawsuit against InfoWars last month in a very similar case.
The plaintiffs are seeking at least $1,000,000 for “malicious harm to their emotional states and reputations.”