Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Lewis, 6, who died at Sandy Hook, are seeking $150 million in damages for years of torture and threats they endured after Mr. Jones lied about them in Infowars, the Austin’s. -Website and broadcast based. He was sued in the first of three trials in which jurors will decide how much he must pay the relatives of 10 people killed in the Dec. 14, 2012, mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., for spreading falsehoods that they were agents of an operation “false flag,” designed by the government as a pretext for gun control. Last year Mr. Jones lost a series of Sandy Hook defamation cases by default, setting the stage for the damages lawsuits. Mr. Heslin, Ms. Lewis and JT Lewis, Jesse’s brother, will testify this week. More important than the money, the parents said, is society’s verdict on a culture in which viral misinformation damages lives and destroys reputations, yet those who spread it are rarely held accountable. “Speech is free, but lies you pay for,” Mark Bankston, the parents’ attorney, said in his opening statement last week. “This is a case of creating change.” But the trial demonstrates how difficult it is to refute the views of hard-line conspiracy theorists. During nearly three days of testimony last week, Daria Karpova, a corporate spokeswoman for Infowars, made false allegations, refusing even to rule out the possibility that the trial itself was a sham. He cast Mr. Jones as a victim, worrying about his health and saying the Sandy Hook lawsuits had cost him “millions.” That plea allowed the families’ lawyers to share records with the jury that showed Infowars made more than $50 million a year in recent years. At the center of the trial is a June 2017 episode of NBC’s “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly,” in which Ms. Kelly profiled Mr. Jones. On the show Mr Heslin protested Mr Jones’ denial of the shooting. He recalled his final moments with Jesse, saying, “I held my son with a bullet hole in his head.” Afterward, Mr. Jones and Owen Sroyer, Mr. Jones’ lieutenant at Infowars, aired broadcasts implying that Mr. Heslin had lied. “Will there be clarification from Heslin or Megyn Kelly?” Mr. Shroyer told Infowars. “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
The Sandy Hook School Massacre
Card 1 of 5 A devastating attack. On December 14, 2012, a 20-year-old gunman killed his mother and then entered the elementary school armed with semi-automatic handguns and a semi-automatic rifle. There he killed 26 people, 20 of them children, before killing himself. The push for gun control. Then-President Barack Obama vowed to “use every power in this office” to stop such massacres from happening again. Although legislative efforts to pass an assault weapons ban and expand background checks failed, a new wave of activism focused on gun control gained traction after the shooting. Lawyers say the three trials provide lessons for other cases against conspiracy-minded defendants, from the Jan. 6 rioters to Trump allies sued for falsely claiming voting machine manufacturers helped “steal” the 2020 presidential election. Mr Jones is also being investigated for his role in events surrounding the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “These Sandy Hook parents have spent years of their lives and sacrificed what’s left of their privacy to shine a light on the peddlers of misinformation, not only to seek justice for their children, but to the people who profit from the tragedy to consider the consequences of its actions,” said Karen Burgess, an attorney at Burgess Law in Austin, who represented Dominion Voting Systems when it was sued by Texas conspiracy theorists who said the company helped 2020 vote rigging. Faced with court sanctions, conspiracy theorists dropped their lawsuit against the company. Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families say a verdict, expected this week in the first trial, could send a message to other purveyors of conspiracy about the cost of online lies and set in motion a chain of events that could shut down Infowars . However, the way forward is not clear. On Friday, Mr. Jones filed for Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which normally automatically halts all pending litigation. Free Speech Systems, however, has asked the bankruptcy court to lift that automatic stay so that the ongoing trial can proceed to a verdict. That motion is set for a hearing Monday morning in bankruptcy court in Victoria, Texas. Travis County District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble said the trial will continue. Lawyers for the families say a grand jury award this week along with bankruptcy could threaten Infowars’ operations, but many details about Mr. Jones’ current finances are unclear. For now, the filing puts on hold the remaining two Sandy Hook compensation trials, both scheduled for September. In court last week, Mr. Jones’ lawyers launched a defense put forward by other defendants in defamation cases: Our national discourse has been so tainted by misinformation, they said, that who really knows what is true or false? Federico Antino Reynal, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, blamed errors in the mainstream media’s reporting of Sandy Hook on false theories spread by Mr. Jones. “He had seen what he perceived as so many lies and so many cover-ups and so much hand-washing of the facts that he had become prejudiced,” Mr Reynal said. “He looked at the world with dirty glasses. And if you look at the world with dirty glasses, everything you see is dirty.” But Infowars executives testified that they did not check readily available evidence about Sandy Hook — or much else — before airing their inflammatory claims. Lawyers for Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis, using internal emails and testimony from Infowars staff, showed how Mr. Jones and his top lieutenants ignored multiple warnings that continuing to spread lies at Sandy Hook would harm them survivors and would land Infowars in legal trouble. In a videotaped deposition, a former employee, Rob Jacobson, said he repeatedly delivered these warnings to Infowars executives, “only to be met with laughter and jokes.” The NBC episode, shown in court, was particularly striking. In it, Mr Jones made a number of damaging false claims, including dismissing a 2017 suicide bombing that killed 22 adults and children at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, as an attack on “a bunch of liberal trendsetters”, who support “Islamist” immigration. Mr. Shroyer also testified that he failed to check a false report about the episode that discredited Mr. Heslin because he did not have the time. At the trial last week, Mr. Jones’ seat at the defense table often remained empty. His lawyer, Mr. Reynal, declined to say whether he would testify, adding that Mr. Jones was responsible for his own defense. Mr Reynal told the judge that Mr Jones’ absences were due to a “medical condition” which Mr Jones, speaking outside court, described as an untreated hernia. But he continues to broadcast his show, where he and Mr. Shroyer mocked the trial last week, in violation of the judge’s order not to comment on the trial. When Mr Jones came to court, he rode in a motorcade and sat in the courtroom surrounded by bodyguards. Last week Mr Reynal put a raised middle finger in the face of the families’ lawyer in a row over exhibits that almost ended in a punch. The trial has affected Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis. They hired security after spotting people waiting for them outside their hotel and heard Infowars loyalists describe them as pawns in Mr Jones’ pursuit of online influence. During his court testimony on Thursday, Mr. Shroyer suggested that it was the lawsuits, not his and Mr. Jones’s lies, that worsened the families’ suffering. “I’m very upset that this is going on,” he said, citing the “huge negative impact on my career and my livelihood.”
