Judge allows Sandy Hook parents’ lawsuit against Alex Jones to move forward

A Texas judge has decided to allow a lawsuit filed by the parents of a victim of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School to move forward against career conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who previously tried to have the suit dismissed.

NBC News reports that the suit filed by Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, the parents of 6-year-old Noah Pozner could proceed and that the parents could have access to four depositions, including one with Jones. InfoWars, Jones’ media outlet, is also named in the suit.

The suit seeks over $1 million in damages from Infowars (which is based in Austin) and a related company, Free Speech Systems LLC. A reporter for InfoWars named Owen Shroyer is also named in the suit. The suit also charges Jones and InfoWars for falsely calling the parents liars. An April 2017 segment on InfoWars featured Jones claiming that an interview De La Rosa gave on CNN was faked.

“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,” A transcript in the lawsuit quotes Jones as saying. “They’re recycling a green-screen behind them.”

Jones has been recycling these conspiracy theories for years.

“Folks, we’ve got video of Anderson Cooper with clear blue-screen out there,” Jones said during a segment from 2014. “He’s not there in the town square. We got people clearly coming up and laughing and then doing the fake crying. We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts for different people, the building bulldozed, covering up everything.”

Jones’ followers have been known to act on his theories. In 2015, 30 year-old Timothy Rogalski was arrested after he repeatedly left threatening voicemails for the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary. In 2016, 57-year-old Lucy Richards of Tampa, Florida was indicted on four counts of threats she made to the parents of Sandy Hook children. Richards told Pozner in a voicemail, “You gonna die, death is coming to you real soon.” She also said, “Look behind you it’s death,” according to court documents. The family members of Sandy Hook teacher Victoria Soto, who lost her life trying to protect her students, were also the targets of threats over the years.

Jones isn’t only facing suits from Sandy Hook parents. His career of spreading lies and misinformation has garnered numerous lawsuits from people swept up in his outlet’s reckless reporting. In a defamation suit filed earlier this month, Marcel Fontaine said he was falsely accused of being the Parkland shooter by InfoWars. Last month, the man who recorded the deadly car attack at last year’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, sued Jones for calling him a “deep state shill” and a “CIA asset” who was in on the attack.

Another lawsuit pending against Jones was filed back in April by Neil Heslin, who lost his 6-year-old son at Sandy Hook. Heslin’s suit focuses on InfoWars reporter Owen Shroyer, who claimed that Heslin lied during an interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly where he said he held his dead son’s body. Shroyer said Heslin was lying because, according to him, victims aren’t identified by relatives in person, only through photographs. But as Heslin’s suit points out, the children’s bodies were eventually turned over to their families for funeral services.

Jones’ reasoning for having the suits dismissed center around his claim that he was acting as a journalist when he questioned authorities’ narrative of the shooting. He has since said he believes the shooting actually “happened.”

During a segment of the Alex Jones Show in April, Jones took an opportunity to weave the lawsuits into another conspiracy, claiming they’re part of a wider plot to take him down.

“The suit by the media, by the Democrats, using the poor parents, is meant to just demonize yours truly building up to something big,” Jones said in a clip flagged by Media Matters.

“They physically, I can guarantee you, want to assassinate my character ahead of setting me up, putting me in prison, or having me killed,” he continued. “If you don’t think the globalists don’t kill people all day — they’ve hijacked America, they killed President Kennedy, they’re trying to kill President Trump.”

Featured image via screen grab/YouTube