In one sense, the defamation cases against Alex Jones, brought by the families of children and staff members who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, ended Oct. 12, 2022, when the second of two damages trials resulted in a jury verdict of almost $1 billion. But for those families, the story isn’t really over, even as a new HBO documentary recounts how they tried to bring one of their biggest media tormentors to heel.
As the new film “The Truth vs. Alex Jones” once again makes painfully clear, Jones was one of the loudest voices amplifying lies about those who were killed at Sandy Hook. In 2012, when the mass shooting took place, the conspiracy kingpin was near the height of his power and reach; as he has done with countless other mass casualty events, he repeatedly called the shooting a “hoax” and a “false flag,” and provided a platform for other Sandy Hook deniers to do so as well. (In 2019, Jones aired a brief segment calling me a “liar” and a “witch” for a book I wrote, which mentioned false flag conspiracy theories. It’s no longer findable on Infowars.com, though it can still be viewed on Internet Archive.)
For the families affected by Jones and other Sandy Hook deniers, truly moving on from these lies has remained impossible.
After years of making defamatory claims about Sandy Hook parents on air — calling Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died, “an actor” for instance — Jones and his company, Infowars, were sued by Sandy Hook families in both Texas and Connecticut in 2018. The film follows the Texas and Connecticut plaintiffs through years of proceedings; while Jones declined to be interviewed, the documentary does include interviews with several prominent Sandy Hook deniers.
Jones and Infowars were found liable by default in both states in 2021 after failing to respond to discovery. The jury in the first damages trial found that they should pay $49 million in damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse died in the shooting. Following the even larger verdict in Connecticut, Jones filed for Chapter 11 personal bankruptcy in December 2022. He has yet to pay a penny of the damages, though, as the case moves through bankruptcy court. In February, the Sandy Hook families –now Jones’ largest creditor — voted to conclude the bankruptcy proceedings by liquidating his assets and distributing the proceeds. An approval hearing on that plan is scheduled for May.
While the twin verdicts represent a resounding repudiation of Sandy Hook lies, for the families affected by Jones and other Sandy Hook deniers, truly moving on from these lies has remained impossible.
“The harassment never goes away,” Lenny Pozner told MSNBC. His son Noah was the youngest child who was killed at Sandy Hook, and Pozner and his former wife, Veronique De La Rosa, have been singled out for some of the most direct, vicious and sustained harassment. “Every anniversary, every new mass casualty incident, every time the media brings up Jones, the attacks intensify. In order to live my life, I have learned to navigate the constant danger.”
It’s also been difficult to get closure in any traditional sense, Pozner says. “When your grief is interrupted repeatedly in such a vile way, you can’t really go through a normal grieving process. I have to continue to retell and relive the day of my son’s murder and all of the abuse that came after, simply because the tragedy was monetized.”
To fight lies about the shooting, in 2014 Pozner founded the HONR Network, which focuses on trying to stem online harassment of people who are being targeted by others who deny mass casualty events, those he refers to as “hoaxers.” There are many of them, he says, who haven’t let up for a single day.
“While Jones is the popular face of conspiracy, he is hardly the only source of hate. I established the HONR Network in order to help others who were being similarly abused online by hoaxers. My success, the HONR Network’s success, has certainly made me a target for people who want to use the internet to abuse.”
Pozner and De La Rosa are also suing Jones and Infowars in Texas. Their case has not yet gone to trial, although their harassment was frequently referenced during the court proceedings in the other two damages trials.
“It is extremely frustrating to hear my story repurposed,” Pozner says. “I am a private person and so I don’t relish being in court, but I don’t have a choice. I have to testify, both to honor Noah’s story and to reclaim my own.”
“Everything about our legal system and our culture is not well equipped to solve this,” says Mark Bankston, a Texas attorney who led the litigation team representing Heslin and Lewis. (He also represents Pozner and De La Rosa.) During the trial, Bankston revealed to Jones’ shock that his attorneys had accidentally sent Bankston’s team a complete copy of his cellphone, disclosing vital information about the case.
Bankston says it’s difficult for him to realize that he can’t fully fix what brought his clients into the courtroom to begin with. “You realize there’s a blemish that’s never going away. It’s never going to stop. It makes me sad that I can’t solve that for them.”
“I suspect [Jones] will emerge as influential as ever,” says Norm Pattis, an attorney who represented Jones in the Connecticut proceedings, and who has represented him intermittently for years. “I think the Sandy Hook litigation is a unique failure in American jurisprudence. It’s clearly an eye-popping verdict. But the clients will get pennies on the dollar and Jones will not have been silenced. So what was it all for?” (Pattis is facing the potential suspension of his law license for accidentally turning over confidential medical records of the Sandy Hook families to lawyers representing Jones in the Texas case. His license to practice remains active while he appeals the decision.)
Those who know Jones seem to agree that he’d be functionally unable to do anything besides his show; that for him, there would be no second act. “It’s how he identifies himself,” says Josh Owens, a former producer of Infowars who worked there for four years, becoming part of Jones’ inner circle. Owens quit working for Infowars in 2017, and wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine about his deep regrets over his time there. Being on air, bellowing into a camera, Owens adds, “It’s who he is. I don’t think he’d survive without it.”
Dan Reed, the director of the documentary, says it’s clear to him that he wasn’t making a film about the end of Jones. Instead, he says, it’s about the bravery it took for the parents and their attorneys to show up and find a way to introduce, as he puts it, “drag” on a business model built on lies.
The film, Reed says, is also about the fervid political environment and chaotic information ecosystem that created Jones. “To me, it’s a seminal story of how things flipped and how one man discovered a business model that allowed him to make a lot of money,” he says, “and how that translated into remote harm for these staggeringly, almost iconically innocent victims. It’s a fable of our times.”
“He’s not going to stop, clearly,” Reed says of Jones. “He’ll always find a way. But this has introduced a lot of friction for him. This will slow him down.”
