Alex Jones Trial: Witnesses Describe Conspiracy Theories
Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:46 pm
Part 1 of 2
Alex Jones Trial Takeaways: Witnesses Describe Conspiracy Theories Following Them After Shooting
The first day of testimony in a trial to determine how much Mr. Jones must pay in damages included an F.B.I. agent and the sister of a teacher who was killed. Both of them were targeted by Jones and his followers.
New York Times
Sept. 13, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/13 ... hook-trial
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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Alex Jones talks to media during a separate damages trial this summer in Austin, Texas. Credit...Pool photo by Briana Sanchez
Alex Jones Defamation Cases
• 2nd Trial Begins
• What to Know
• $45 Million Verdict in Texas
• Jones Accused of Hiding Assets
6 takeaways from the first day of Alex Jones’s damages trial in Connecticut.
by Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and far-right media personality, is on trial in Connecticut over the falsehoods and provocations he promoted in the wake of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — and the cascading impact those lies had on the victims’ families. The civil case — one of several he faces in connection with the shooting — will determine the financial damages owed by Mr. Jones and his company, Infowars, to eight families and one F.B.I. agent who responded to the attack.
The trial’s opening statements on Tuesday, in a courtroom in Waterbury, Conn., hinted at broader issues at stake in the trial. Lawyers for the plaintiffs described how Mr. Jones promoted hoaxes about Sandy Hook through his media operation, drawing viewers and reaping millions of dollars in profits. A lawyer for Mr. Jones, in turn, accused the plaintiffs of targeting his client and politicizing the attack.
Mr. Jones for years spread bogus theories that the December 2012 attack — which killed 20 first graders and six educators — was part of a government-led plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms, and that the victims’ families were “crisis actors” in the scheme. People who believed those false claims repeatedly harassed the families at their homes and at events honoring their slain loved ones, and in some cases threatened their lives.
Mr. Jones has already been found liable by default in this case, after he did not turn over documents and other records under court orders.
Here are some takeaways from the first day of trial:
• Judge Barbara N. Bellis wrangled with Mr. Jones’s defense team, continuing a dynamic that has persisted for years during this case. Before the jury entered the courtroom Tuesday morning, Judge Bellis castigated the lawyers for what she called a “stunningly cavalier attitude” toward discovery, referring to a Google Analytics spreadsheet that described years of website traffic to Infowars, which lawyers for the families said Tuesday had only been shared last Friday. And throughout the day’s proceedings, Judge Bellis reprimanded Norm Pattis, one of Jones’s lawyers, for repeatedly raising political issues and hypotheticals in his questioning of the plaintiffs’ witnesses.
• The Infowars business model is a central theme in the trial so far. In his opening statement, Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families, laid out how Mr. Jones’s media empire broadcast conspiracy theories “to elicit fear and anxiety and paranoia and anger” in his audience — and simultaneously made millions peddling supplements and other merchandise. “You know the difference between right and wrong,” he told the jury. “You know the importance of standing up to bullies when they prey on people who are helpless and who profit from them.”
• In his opening statement, Mr. Pattis accused the plaintiffs of turning a trial over damages into a crusade to “stop Alex Jones.” Mr. Pattis said the parents “turned their grief and rage” to a campaign for gun control and school safety, and overstated the harm Mr. Jones did. “Don’t fall for the political narrative here,” he said to the jury.
• The trial’s first witness was William Aldenberg, an F.B.I. agent who responded to the Sandy Hook shooting and who is suing Jones along with eight families. He was targeted by conspiracy theorists who claimed that he and one of the parents were the same person, played by a “crisis actor.” Aldenberg choked back tears on the witness stand as he described what he saw in the school that day, as well as the harassment he and victims’ families endured.
• Both Mr. Aldenberg and the second witness, Carlee Soto Parisi — the sister of a first-grade teacher murdered at Sandy Hook — showed the jury the day-to-day toll that the flood of conspiracy theories had on them, and how they felt helpless to stop it. Mr. Aldenberg described getting harassing phone calls and emails, and how he came to understand “the power and enormity of this Infowars, Alex Jones thing.” Ms. Parisi described a campaign of online torment, in which people called her a liar and a fraud, picked apart her appearance as proof of the hoax Mr. Jones promoted, and posted her personal information.
• Alex Jones himself was not present in court on Tuesday. Instead, on his eponymous show, he dismissed the legal proceedings as “show trials” and peddled products that he said would keep Infowars afloat. But he is expected to testify at the trial.
***
The sister of a Sandy Hook victim describes the toll taken by accusations that the shooting was fake.
by Tiffany Hsu
Sept. 13, 2022, 5:30 p.m. ET
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Carlee Soto Parisi, in 2013 as she was comforted by another family member of a Sandy Hook victim. She was targeted by Alex Jones and his followers after the shooting. Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
The night before Carlee Soto Parisi’s sister died, the two were goofing around, talking about Ms. Parisi’s college plans and getting on their mother’s nerves, she said.
But there was no more normalcy after Vicki Soto, a first-grade teacher, was murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. On Tuesday, during a trial to determine how much Alex Jones owes in damages after defaming family members of those killed, Ms. Parisi recounted the bizarre experience of having to justify that her sister’s death was real and trying to convince conspiracy theorists over and over that she was not an actress.
An Associated Press photo of Ms. Parisi weeping on the phone that day was published widely, and within months, she realized that conspiracy theorists had become fixated on it. Claiming that she was a crisis actor who had appeared in images of mourners from other tragedies, such as the Aurora theater shooting in the summer of 2012 and the Boston Marathon bombings in the spring of 2013, strangers scrutinized her hair, her face, the position of her arm and decided that the photo was fake.
From there, Ms. Parisi testified, “I felt like it snowballed,” as friends sent her articles and she was tagged in accusatory posts on social media platforms. A former middle school classmate even declared that the massacre was a hoax.
Through tears, Ms. Parisi described the emotional toll of the false claims: “It’s hurtful. It’s devastating. It’s crippling,” she said. “You can’t breathe properly because you’re constantly defending yourself and your family and your loved ones.”
Although she was proud to be Ms. Soto’s sister, Ms. Parisi said she sometimes pretended that they weren’t related to avoid arguments with potential conspiracy theorists.
After getting married, she briefly left Stratford, Conn., where she had been living. But the harassment followed her to North Carolina, where a sticky note was left on her door saying she “needed to go to church.” Ms. Parisi said that her physical address and email address were posted repeatedly, along with details about her siblings and her spouse. A family friend tried to have them removed, but “within minutes, it was shared on another platform, and it was copied and pasted,” often accompanied with “nasty messages,” she said.
The threatening emails and social media messages would sometimes be accompanied by a gun emoji, leading Ms. Parisi and her husband to speak with law enforcement “because we were scared for our lives,” she said.
At one point, the family organized a 5K charity run in Ms. Soto’s honor. A man, Matthew Mills of Brooklyn, appeared in a “Team Vicki” shirt waving a photo and declaring that “this never happened.” He was arrested and charged with breaching the peace.
Mr. Jones’s lawyer asked Ms. Parisi why she waited until 2018 to sue.
“I’m just one person,” she said. “I didn’t think I had a voice.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:58 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
We are adjourning for the day.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:50 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Soto describes a 5K run the family held in honor of her sister to which a man showed up, waving a photo and saying “this never happened.” That man was Matthew Mills of Brooklyn. He was arrested and charged with breaching the peace.
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Credit...Autumn Driscoll/Hearst Connecticut Media, via Associated Press
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:46 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
The threatening emails and social media messages would sometimes be accompanied by a gun emoji, leading Soto and her husband to speak with law enforcement “because we were scared for our lives,” she says.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:46 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Carlee Soto is describing a campaign of online torment in which people called her a liar and fraud. Her address and personal information were "copied and pasted, it was like a picture that they would keep posting over and over again.” Someone left a note on her door, “saying I needed to go to church.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:39 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
“And from there, I felt like it snowballed,” she said. Friends would send her articles and she would be tagged in posts on social media that accused her of being a fraud.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:38 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
The photo became the basis of conspiracy theorists’ false claims that Carlee Soto couldn’t be a “real” grieving sister because her hair, her face, the position of her arm were wrong. Widely circulated conspiracy theories falsely claimed the photo was fake and she was an actress. "I just couldn’t wrap my head around that,” she said.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:27 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
An AP photo of Carlee Soto weeping on the phone that traveled around the world is displayed in court.
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Credit...Jessica Hill/Associated Press
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:23 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Soto is describing her sister’s last evening before the shooting, when she attended a book fair and returned with a big bag of books for her class—and a new cellphone to replace the one she had dropped in the toilet. It’s an arresting portrait of two sisters that establishes the everyday truth of Vicki Soto’s life, and her death, which the family learned about in the firehouse, down the lane from the school.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:08 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
The jury is back. The next to testify is Carlee Soto Parisi, sister of Vicki Soto, a first grade teacher murdered at Sandy Hook.
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Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:35 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Under questioning by Jones’s lawyer, Aldenberg describes the early quandary that many of the targets of abuse describe. Do you confront, report, or stay quiet, hoping it stops? This is one reason the families in this case did not sue until 2018, a fact Jones’s lawyer is attempting to use to minimize the damage. If it was so bad, he argues, why didn’t the families sue earlier?
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:31 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
Aldenberg says that by 2016, he had contacted multiple people from the F.B.I., the agents’ association and the U.S. attorney’s office to help him with the harassment he experienced. No arrests were made.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:26 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
We’re back. Jones’s lawyer is questioning Aldenberg.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:12 p.m. ET
Linda Qiu
On Alex Jones’s show, the absent defendant criticized his trial and pleaded for financial support.
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Alex Jones in his control room in Austin, Texas, in 2017.Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
Alex Jones was not present on the first day of his trial in Connecticut, but he dismissed the proceedings from afar on his eponymous show while advertising products that he said would keep Infowars afloat.
Mr. Jones characterized all the cases against him as “show trials,” where judges have predetermined the outcome, and himself as a “beta test” for unnamed powerful people to use as an example.
“Why is the jury deciding how guilty I am? Why is the jury being told I’m guilty?” he said on “The Alex Jones Show” on Tuesday.
“They’re coming for everybody,” he added. “We’re in a war. This is total tyranny.”
Mr. Jones was found liable by default in four defamation cases because he and his lawyers repeatedly ignored court orders to turn over documents and records. Judges in Connecticut and Texas expressed frustration with Mr. Jones’s refusal to cooperate in the discovery process, even as he faced penalties.
Mr. Jones “has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of the Travis County District Court wrote in her ruling granting a default judgment, which detailed several attempts to compel Mr. Jones to comply.
Echoing his lawyer in the courtroom, Mr. Jones also plugged his new book and complained that it did not appear on The New York Times’s best-seller list last week. Mr. Jones said, without evidence, that the omission amounted to censorship.
Best-seller lists all apply different methodologies and can result in different rankings. A spokesman for The Times noted that the newspaper applied the same standards each week and that “conservative authors have routinely ranked high and in great numbers on The Times’s lists.”
Despite the “deception” from The Times, Mr. Jones predicted that he will likely earn millions of dollars from book sales, which he said he will “shoot” directly back into his beleaguered and costly website.
“Now is the most critical time ever to support Infowars.com,” Mr. Jones told his viewers, as he urged them to purchase supplements and a collectible coin.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:11 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
The worst part of all this, Aldenberg says, is that David Wheeler, a grieving dad, was targeted because he looks like Aldenberg. Because of that, the F.B.I. agent says, he feels responsible. We’re taking a 15-minute break.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:02 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
What’s upsetting to Aldenberg, he says, are the profits generated through spreading lies about the shooting and his relative powerlessness to stop it. “He’s affiliated with some very powerful people,” Aldenberg said of Jones, adding he assumed “I’d just have to accept it.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:01 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Aldenberg’s testimony is showing the jury the wearying, terrifying, day-to-day toll that the flood of conspiracy theories and harassing phone calls and emails had on him and his family and his colleagues. Aldenberg says he came to understand “the power and enormity of this Infowars, Alex Jones thing.”
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Credit...Pool photo by H. John Voorhees III
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:53 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg is now describing how he became part of bogus theories spread by Jones and others. In mid-2015, he said his son showed him how people were saying he and David Wheeler, whose son Ben died, were the same “crisis actor.” Ben died in his classroom.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:46 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
A victim specialist at the F.B.I.’s local Connecticut office spent 90 percent of her time over the 18 months after the attack fielding concerns about harassment of Newtown residents and family members of the Sandy Hook attack, Aldenberg testifies. Those concerns included death threats, prank calls, telling people their children weren’t dead — that they were actors. “Serious stuff, from seriously disturbed people,” he said. The victim specialist ended up transferring — and the calls continued.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:39 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
Infowars’ revenues and Alex Jones’s worth is central to the Connecticut trial.
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An infowars.com sticker on a traffic sign outside the courthouse in Waterbury, Conn., on Tuesday.Credit...Michelle McLoughlin/Reuters
Alex Jones’s business model and income is taking center stage early in the trial to determine how much he owes in damages after defaming family members of children killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families, focused much of his opening statement on the profit-making infrastructure constructed by Mr. Jones around Infowars, his media outlet. The lawyer drew a direct line between the misinformation frequently spread by Mr. Jones — conspiracy theories that the government was trying to lower the population’s sex drive or create food shortages or increase radiation levels — and the fear he stoked in his audience.
That fear, Mr. Mattei said, led listeners and viewers to buy the “vitality” drugs, “storable” food and iodine products that Mr. Jones sold on the Infowars store, which he advertises widely across his various platforms.
Alex Jones’s father, David Jones, was key to his son’s success, Mr. Mattei said. The successful former dentist financed Infowars as a start-up and guided the younger Mr. Jones into the high-margin diet supplements business. The lawyer said that jurors would hear the elder Mr. Jones testify about how Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, connected its news coverage to the products it was selling.
Mr. Mattei also laid out how Mr. Jones grew his influence, expanding beyond his early career in radio to capitalize on the internet with multiple websites and shows, eventually making inroads abroad and setting up a retail presence on Amazon and eBay. He dove into social media, where his online segments could be easily spliced “into little segments, little digestible videos,” Mr. Mattei said.
“Alex Jones was perfectly positioned to take advantage of exponential growth that social media would allow, because he had a ready-made audience that was buying into his stuff, he had the type of medium that was most easily spread and engaged with,” Mr. Mattei said.
Norm Pattis, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, urged the jury in his own opening statement to “listen carefully to what will be said about money in this case,” stressing that the families’ lawyers have “transformed money into a political weapon in this trial, and we’re going to ask you to disarm that.”
“This isn’t a casino,” Mr. Pattis said to jurors of the families’ quest for compensation. “You’re not clerks at a grocery story selling quick-pick tickets.”
Mr. Mattei showed the jury a slide with traffic data from December 2012, the month of the shooting, showing that Infowars drew more than 4.6 million users and 24.9 million page views.
A report on Infowars published in September 2014, claiming falsely that the F.B.I. said that no one was killed at Sandy Hook, attracted 2.9 million viewers and was the second-most-popular article published on the site between January 2013 and June 2019. The day the article was published, Infowars earned $48,230 in revenue. The next day, the site earned $232,825, then $128,855 the next. That year, his content drew 2.2 billion impressions on social media.
Mr. Jones has claimed that his legal troubles have left him struggling financially, a characterization disputed by the families’ lawyers, who say that he has siphoned funds from his businesses and manipulated the bankruptcy system to hide the full scope of his assets. A forensic economist who testified during the prior damages trial in Texas estimated that Mr. Jones and Free Speech Systems were worth as much as $270 million together and that Infowars earned more than $64 million last year.
On his show on Infowars during the trial on Tuesday, Mr. Jones urged his viewers to give him financial support and buy collectible coins he was selling.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:31 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
In response to a series of questions from Mattei about whether he saw any actors at Sandy Hook that day and if the children were real, Aldenberg choked back tears, breathlessly saying: “It was awful. It was awful. It was awful.” He didn’t know who Alex Jones was that day, but Aldenberg is testifying now because of how Jones recast Sandy Hook as a hoax.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:25 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg is struggling to compose himself. He found teacher Vicki Soto’s body and saw what he thought was her cell phone next to her, “lighting up.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:16 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Aldenberg says that by the time he entered the school, he understood that the active shooter situation was “done, it was over.” So, as he walks the jury through the photographs of the school, he is describing what he encountered in the aftermath of the attacks — starting with two women killed near the entrance. He soon learned they were the principal and the school psychologist.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:10 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Chris Mattei, the Sandy Hook families’ lawyer, is taking Aldenberg through the day of the shooting. He paused first, walked to the gallery and whispered to the families, cautioning them about the testimony to follow.
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Credit...Pool photo by H John Voorhees II
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:06 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
And we’re back in the courtroom from lunch recess. We are resuming with William Aldenberg, an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting in 2012 and was implicated in the conspiracy theories Jones endorsed. He is a plaintiff.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:31 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
The list of legal cases against Alex Jones is not short.
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Edgar Maddison Welch, 28 of Salisbury, N.C., as he surrendered to police in Washington in 2016. Welch said he was investigating a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza place. Credit...Sathi Soma, via Associated Press
The Sandy Hook lawsuits are the highest profile and potentially most costly in a string of legal actions taken against Alex Jones in recent years by people harmed by his conspiracy lies. Here are a few of them.
• In 2016, an Infowars video in which Mr. Jones falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats were trafficking children from a Washington pizzeria inspired Edgar Maddison Welch to enter the Comet Ping Pong restaurant during the dinner hour to “self-investigate” the bogus claim, firing a rifle in the process. No one was hurt, and Mr. Welch was sentenced to four years in federal prison. In 2017, Mr. Jones’s lawyer at the time, Mark Bailen, reached an agreement with the restaurant’s owner in which Mr. Jones aired a public retraction and removed videos from Infowars’ website airing his “Pizzagate” lies. (Mr. Welch was released in 2020.)
• A month after his public apology for his “Pizzagate” lies, Mr. Jones was sued by Chobani yogurt company, led by billionaire Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant committed to employing refugees in his plants. Mr. Jones in 2017 aired broadcasts falsely linking Chobani’s refugee employees in Twin Falls, Idaho, to crime and an increase in tuberculosis cases, accusing the company of “importing migrant rapists.” Mr. Jones’s lawyer at the time, Mr. Bailen, brokered another public retraction by Mr. Jones, and Chobani dropped the suit.
• In 2017, when a neo-Nazi attending the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., sped his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32, a former State Department employee, Brennan Gilmore, filmed and posted the attack. Infowars falsely accused Mr. Gilmore of being a C.I.A. officer who staged the attack to discredit President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Gilmore, subjected to death threats and online abuse, sued Infowars for defamation in 2018. Infowars settled the case for $50,000 this year, and acknowledged its role in the abuse. (This is described in the book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.”)
• In 2018, Infowars was sued for defamation by Marcel Fontaine, after the conspiracy theorist website wrongly accused him of being the gunman in the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Mr. Fontaine, who lived in Boston and had never been to Florida, was subjected to a torrent of threats. He died in a fire earlier this year, and his family is pursuing the lawsuit.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:13 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
We are breaking for lunch now. We will resume with Aldenberg’s testimony at 2 p.m.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:03 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
I’ve interviewed a number of the first responders who, like Aldenberg, were among the first on the scene. They often struggle, as Aldenberg is doing now, to speak about that day, much less what they saw.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:01 p.m. ET
Linda Qiu
Jones is now addressing his legal troubles on his show on Infowars, calling them “show trials” with predetermined outcomes. Jones is warning his viewers that “they’re coming for everybody” and he needs financial support to keep up his fight. Jones then transitions into advertising a collectable coin.
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Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 12:56 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg was at a training near Newtown on Dec. 14, 2012, when a call came in about an active shooter at Sandy Hook school. He is having trouble maintaining his composure while recalling that morning.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 12:55 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg is the only non-family member who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. He was targeted by conspiracy theorists after a bogus theory spread that he and one of the parents were the same person.
Alex Jones Trial Takeaways: Witnesses Describe Conspiracy Theories Following Them After Shooting
The first day of testimony in a trial to determine how much Mr. Jones must pay in damages included an F.B.I. agent and the sister of a teacher who was killed. Both of them were targeted by Jones and his followers.
New York Times
Sept. 13, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/13 ... hook-trial
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Alex Jones talks to media during a separate damages trial this summer in Austin, Texas. Credit...Pool photo by Briana Sanchez
Alex Jones Defamation Cases
• 2nd Trial Begins
• What to Know
• $45 Million Verdict in Texas
• Jones Accused of Hiding Assets
6 takeaways from the first day of Alex Jones’s damages trial in Connecticut.
by Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and far-right media personality, is on trial in Connecticut over the falsehoods and provocations he promoted in the wake of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — and the cascading impact those lies had on the victims’ families. The civil case — one of several he faces in connection with the shooting — will determine the financial damages owed by Mr. Jones and his company, Infowars, to eight families and one F.B.I. agent who responded to the attack.
The trial’s opening statements on Tuesday, in a courtroom in Waterbury, Conn., hinted at broader issues at stake in the trial. Lawyers for the plaintiffs described how Mr. Jones promoted hoaxes about Sandy Hook through his media operation, drawing viewers and reaping millions of dollars in profits. A lawyer for Mr. Jones, in turn, accused the plaintiffs of targeting his client and politicizing the attack.
Mr. Jones for years spread bogus theories that the December 2012 attack — which killed 20 first graders and six educators — was part of a government-led plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms, and that the victims’ families were “crisis actors” in the scheme. People who believed those false claims repeatedly harassed the families at their homes and at events honoring their slain loved ones, and in some cases threatened their lives.
Mr. Jones has already been found liable by default in this case, after he did not turn over documents and other records under court orders.
Here are some takeaways from the first day of trial:
• Judge Barbara N. Bellis wrangled with Mr. Jones’s defense team, continuing a dynamic that has persisted for years during this case. Before the jury entered the courtroom Tuesday morning, Judge Bellis castigated the lawyers for what she called a “stunningly cavalier attitude” toward discovery, referring to a Google Analytics spreadsheet that described years of website traffic to Infowars, which lawyers for the families said Tuesday had only been shared last Friday. And throughout the day’s proceedings, Judge Bellis reprimanded Norm Pattis, one of Jones’s lawyers, for repeatedly raising political issues and hypotheticals in his questioning of the plaintiffs’ witnesses.
• The Infowars business model is a central theme in the trial so far. In his opening statement, Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families, laid out how Mr. Jones’s media empire broadcast conspiracy theories “to elicit fear and anxiety and paranoia and anger” in his audience — and simultaneously made millions peddling supplements and other merchandise. “You know the difference between right and wrong,” he told the jury. “You know the importance of standing up to bullies when they prey on people who are helpless and who profit from them.”
• In his opening statement, Mr. Pattis accused the plaintiffs of turning a trial over damages into a crusade to “stop Alex Jones.” Mr. Pattis said the parents “turned their grief and rage” to a campaign for gun control and school safety, and overstated the harm Mr. Jones did. “Don’t fall for the political narrative here,” he said to the jury.
• The trial’s first witness was William Aldenberg, an F.B.I. agent who responded to the Sandy Hook shooting and who is suing Jones along with eight families. He was targeted by conspiracy theorists who claimed that he and one of the parents were the same person, played by a “crisis actor.” Aldenberg choked back tears on the witness stand as he described what he saw in the school that day, as well as the harassment he and victims’ families endured.
• Both Mr. Aldenberg and the second witness, Carlee Soto Parisi — the sister of a first-grade teacher murdered at Sandy Hook — showed the jury the day-to-day toll that the flood of conspiracy theories had on them, and how they felt helpless to stop it. Mr. Aldenberg described getting harassing phone calls and emails, and how he came to understand “the power and enormity of this Infowars, Alex Jones thing.” Ms. Parisi described a campaign of online torment, in which people called her a liar and a fraud, picked apart her appearance as proof of the hoax Mr. Jones promoted, and posted her personal information.
• Alex Jones himself was not present in court on Tuesday. Instead, on his eponymous show, he dismissed the legal proceedings as “show trials” and peddled products that he said would keep Infowars afloat. But he is expected to testify at the trial.
***
The sister of a Sandy Hook victim describes the toll taken by accusations that the shooting was fake.
by Tiffany Hsu
Sept. 13, 2022, 5:30 p.m. ET
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Carlee Soto Parisi, in 2013 as she was comforted by another family member of a Sandy Hook victim. She was targeted by Alex Jones and his followers after the shooting. Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
The night before Carlee Soto Parisi’s sister died, the two were goofing around, talking about Ms. Parisi’s college plans and getting on their mother’s nerves, she said.
But there was no more normalcy after Vicki Soto, a first-grade teacher, was murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. On Tuesday, during a trial to determine how much Alex Jones owes in damages after defaming family members of those killed, Ms. Parisi recounted the bizarre experience of having to justify that her sister’s death was real and trying to convince conspiracy theorists over and over that she was not an actress.
An Associated Press photo of Ms. Parisi weeping on the phone that day was published widely, and within months, she realized that conspiracy theorists had become fixated on it. Claiming that she was a crisis actor who had appeared in images of mourners from other tragedies, such as the Aurora theater shooting in the summer of 2012 and the Boston Marathon bombings in the spring of 2013, strangers scrutinized her hair, her face, the position of her arm and decided that the photo was fake.
From there, Ms. Parisi testified, “I felt like it snowballed,” as friends sent her articles and she was tagged in accusatory posts on social media platforms. A former middle school classmate even declared that the massacre was a hoax.
Through tears, Ms. Parisi described the emotional toll of the false claims: “It’s hurtful. It’s devastating. It’s crippling,” she said. “You can’t breathe properly because you’re constantly defending yourself and your family and your loved ones.”
Although she was proud to be Ms. Soto’s sister, Ms. Parisi said she sometimes pretended that they weren’t related to avoid arguments with potential conspiracy theorists.
After getting married, she briefly left Stratford, Conn., where she had been living. But the harassment followed her to North Carolina, where a sticky note was left on her door saying she “needed to go to church.” Ms. Parisi said that her physical address and email address were posted repeatedly, along with details about her siblings and her spouse. A family friend tried to have them removed, but “within minutes, it was shared on another platform, and it was copied and pasted,” often accompanied with “nasty messages,” she said.
The threatening emails and social media messages would sometimes be accompanied by a gun emoji, leading Ms. Parisi and her husband to speak with law enforcement “because we were scared for our lives,” she said.
At one point, the family organized a 5K charity run in Ms. Soto’s honor. A man, Matthew Mills of Brooklyn, appeared in a “Team Vicki” shirt waving a photo and declaring that “this never happened.” He was arrested and charged with breaching the peace.
Mr. Jones’s lawyer asked Ms. Parisi why she waited until 2018 to sue.
“I’m just one person,” she said. “I didn’t think I had a voice.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:58 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
We are adjourning for the day.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:50 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Soto describes a 5K run the family held in honor of her sister to which a man showed up, waving a photo and saying “this never happened.” That man was Matthew Mills of Brooklyn. He was arrested and charged with breaching the peace.
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Credit...Autumn Driscoll/Hearst Connecticut Media, via Associated Press
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:46 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
The threatening emails and social media messages would sometimes be accompanied by a gun emoji, leading Soto and her husband to speak with law enforcement “because we were scared for our lives,” she says.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:46 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Carlee Soto is describing a campaign of online torment in which people called her a liar and fraud. Her address and personal information were "copied and pasted, it was like a picture that they would keep posting over and over again.” Someone left a note on her door, “saying I needed to go to church.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:39 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
“And from there, I felt like it snowballed,” she said. Friends would send her articles and she would be tagged in posts on social media that accused her of being a fraud.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:38 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
The photo became the basis of conspiracy theorists’ false claims that Carlee Soto couldn’t be a “real” grieving sister because her hair, her face, the position of her arm were wrong. Widely circulated conspiracy theories falsely claimed the photo was fake and she was an actress. "I just couldn’t wrap my head around that,” she said.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:27 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
An AP photo of Carlee Soto weeping on the phone that traveled around the world is displayed in court.
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Credit...Jessica Hill/Associated Press
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:23 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Soto is describing her sister’s last evening before the shooting, when she attended a book fair and returned with a big bag of books for her class—and a new cellphone to replace the one she had dropped in the toilet. It’s an arresting portrait of two sisters that establishes the everyday truth of Vicki Soto’s life, and her death, which the family learned about in the firehouse, down the lane from the school.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 4:08 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
The jury is back. The next to testify is Carlee Soto Parisi, sister of Vicki Soto, a first grade teacher murdered at Sandy Hook.
[x]
Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:35 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Under questioning by Jones’s lawyer, Aldenberg describes the early quandary that many of the targets of abuse describe. Do you confront, report, or stay quiet, hoping it stops? This is one reason the families in this case did not sue until 2018, a fact Jones’s lawyer is attempting to use to minimize the damage. If it was so bad, he argues, why didn’t the families sue earlier?
Policing Speech Is Easily Done When It’s Negative Speech About the Police
It is well known that the FBI, like schools, attempt almost nothing at all when faced by speech attacks on ordinary citizens, such as the numerous death threats that have been issued to Michael Moore by celebrities such as Clint Eastwood, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly. Institutions constantly claim that they are powerless when death threats are presented against participants and their activities, such as the gamergate threats against Brianna Wu, that the PAX show refused to take seriously. Just like UGA, unable to think of a way to protect a teacher from its students’ verbal savagery.
But we well know that when the shoe is on the other foot, and someone spits a spitwad in the direction of the FBI, the police, or some government figure with a little clout, they shortly find that their IP address has been traced, their anonymity has been ripped off, and they are dealing with a bunch of guys in black ballistic suits carrying automatic rifles who take the computer and its owner down to the station for a little chat that leads, ultimately, to a plea bargain in federal court.
It’s just a question of whose ox is gored. Women just need to start goring some oxen up on Capitol Hill. It might not take a car caravan of angry women circling the Beltway honking their horns and demanding protection from virtual rape, but then again, why not try it?
-- Yik Yak Yuck! These Boys Are Not Alright, by Charles Carreon
-- Yik Yak Yuck! These Boys Are Not Alright, by Charles Carreon
-- -- Don't Ignore the Trolls: Feed Them Until They Explode, by Lindy West
-- Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning The Battle for the Internet, by Ellen Pao
-- #GamerGate Trolls Aren't Ethics Crusaders; They're a Hate Group, by Jennifer Allaway
-- Internet Trolls Really Are Horrible People, by Chris Mooney
-- How Ellen Pao Lost Her Job But Survived Reddit's Swamp of Trolls, by Beth Winegarner
-- LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online, by Whitney Phillips
-- Neo-Nazi website unleashed Internet trolls against a Jewish woman, lawsuit says, by Jenny Jarvie and Jaweed Kaleem
-- Reclaim the Cyber-Commons: The Internet is Being Captured by Organized Trolls. It's Time We Fought Back, by George Monbiot
-- The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck, by Chris Mooney
-- The Trolls Among Us, by Mattathias Schwartz
-- Trolls Just Want to Have Fun, by Erin E. Buckels, Paul D. Trapnell, Delroy L. Paulhus
-- Dear Trolls, by Zelda Williams
-- Robin Williams' Daughter Zelda Driven Off Twitter by Vicious Trolls, by Caitlin Dewey
'-- You want to know what they're writing, even if it hurts': my online abuse: In the early days, the internet was seen as egalitarian and open. So how did the web become a world of bullies and trolls? Five tales from the frontline of online shaming, by Homa Khaleeli
-- Cyberbullying 'worse than face-to-face' abuse, suggests global research, by bbc.co.uk
-- Haters' Rights vs. Human Rights, by Charles Carreon
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:31 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
Aldenberg says that by 2016, he had contacted multiple people from the F.B.I., the agents’ association and the U.S. attorney’s office to help him with the harassment he experienced. No arrests were made.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:26 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
We’re back. Jones’s lawyer is questioning Aldenberg.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:12 p.m. ET
Linda Qiu
On Alex Jones’s show, the absent defendant criticized his trial and pleaded for financial support.
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Alex Jones in his control room in Austin, Texas, in 2017.Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
Alex Jones was not present on the first day of his trial in Connecticut, but he dismissed the proceedings from afar on his eponymous show while advertising products that he said would keep Infowars afloat.
Mr. Jones characterized all the cases against him as “show trials,” where judges have predetermined the outcome, and himself as a “beta test” for unnamed powerful people to use as an example.
“Why is the jury deciding how guilty I am? Why is the jury being told I’m guilty?” he said on “The Alex Jones Show” on Tuesday.
“They’re coming for everybody,” he added. “We’re in a war. This is total tyranny.”
Mr. Jones was found liable by default in four defamation cases because he and his lawyers repeatedly ignored court orders to turn over documents and records. Judges in Connecticut and Texas expressed frustration with Mr. Jones’s refusal to cooperate in the discovery process, even as he faced penalties.
Mr. Jones “has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of the Travis County District Court wrote in her ruling granting a default judgment, which detailed several attempts to compel Mr. Jones to comply.
Echoing his lawyer in the courtroom, Mr. Jones also plugged his new book and complained that it did not appear on The New York Times’s best-seller list last week. Mr. Jones said, without evidence, that the omission amounted to censorship.
Best-seller lists all apply different methodologies and can result in different rankings. A spokesman for The Times noted that the newspaper applied the same standards each week and that “conservative authors have routinely ranked high and in great numbers on The Times’s lists.”
Despite the “deception” from The Times, Mr. Jones predicted that he will likely earn millions of dollars from book sales, which he said he will “shoot” directly back into his beleaguered and costly website.
“Now is the most critical time ever to support Infowars.com,” Mr. Jones told his viewers, as he urged them to purchase supplements and a collectible coin.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:11 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
The worst part of all this, Aldenberg says, is that David Wheeler, a grieving dad, was targeted because he looks like Aldenberg. Because of that, the F.B.I. agent says, he feels responsible. We’re taking a 15-minute break.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:02 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
What’s upsetting to Aldenberg, he says, are the profits generated through spreading lies about the shooting and his relative powerlessness to stop it. “He’s affiliated with some very powerful people,” Aldenberg said of Jones, adding he assumed “I’d just have to accept it.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 3:01 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Aldenberg’s testimony is showing the jury the wearying, terrifying, day-to-day toll that the flood of conspiracy theories and harassing phone calls and emails had on him and his family and his colleagues. Aldenberg says he came to understand “the power and enormity of this Infowars, Alex Jones thing.”
[x]
Credit...Pool photo by H. John Voorhees III
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:53 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg is now describing how he became part of bogus theories spread by Jones and others. In mid-2015, he said his son showed him how people were saying he and David Wheeler, whose son Ben died, were the same “crisis actor.” Ben died in his classroom.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:46 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
A victim specialist at the F.B.I.’s local Connecticut office spent 90 percent of her time over the 18 months after the attack fielding concerns about harassment of Newtown residents and family members of the Sandy Hook attack, Aldenberg testifies. Those concerns included death threats, prank calls, telling people their children weren’t dead — that they were actors. “Serious stuff, from seriously disturbed people,” he said. The victim specialist ended up transferring — and the calls continued.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:39 p.m. ET
Tiffany Hsu
Infowars’ revenues and Alex Jones’s worth is central to the Connecticut trial.
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An infowars.com sticker on a traffic sign outside the courthouse in Waterbury, Conn., on Tuesday.Credit...Michelle McLoughlin/Reuters
Alex Jones’s business model and income is taking center stage early in the trial to determine how much he owes in damages after defaming family members of children killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families, focused much of his opening statement on the profit-making infrastructure constructed by Mr. Jones around Infowars, his media outlet. The lawyer drew a direct line between the misinformation frequently spread by Mr. Jones — conspiracy theories that the government was trying to lower the population’s sex drive or create food shortages or increase radiation levels — and the fear he stoked in his audience.
That fear, Mr. Mattei said, led listeners and viewers to buy the “vitality” drugs, “storable” food and iodine products that Mr. Jones sold on the Infowars store, which he advertises widely across his various platforms.
Alex Jones’s father, David Jones, was key to his son’s success, Mr. Mattei said. The successful former dentist financed Infowars as a start-up and guided the younger Mr. Jones into the high-margin diet supplements business. The lawyer said that jurors would hear the elder Mr. Jones testify about how Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, connected its news coverage to the products it was selling.
Mr. Mattei also laid out how Mr. Jones grew his influence, expanding beyond his early career in radio to capitalize on the internet with multiple websites and shows, eventually making inroads abroad and setting up a retail presence on Amazon and eBay. He dove into social media, where his online segments could be easily spliced “into little segments, little digestible videos,” Mr. Mattei said.
“Alex Jones was perfectly positioned to take advantage of exponential growth that social media would allow, because he had a ready-made audience that was buying into his stuff, he had the type of medium that was most easily spread and engaged with,” Mr. Mattei said.
Norm Pattis, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, urged the jury in his own opening statement to “listen carefully to what will be said about money in this case,” stressing that the families’ lawyers have “transformed money into a political weapon in this trial, and we’re going to ask you to disarm that.”
“This isn’t a casino,” Mr. Pattis said to jurors of the families’ quest for compensation. “You’re not clerks at a grocery story selling quick-pick tickets.”
Mr. Mattei showed the jury a slide with traffic data from December 2012, the month of the shooting, showing that Infowars drew more than 4.6 million users and 24.9 million page views.
A report on Infowars published in September 2014, claiming falsely that the F.B.I. said that no one was killed at Sandy Hook, attracted 2.9 million viewers and was the second-most-popular article published on the site between January 2013 and June 2019. The day the article was published, Infowars earned $48,230 in revenue. The next day, the site earned $232,825, then $128,855 the next. That year, his content drew 2.2 billion impressions on social media.
Mr. Jones has claimed that his legal troubles have left him struggling financially, a characterization disputed by the families’ lawyers, who say that he has siphoned funds from his businesses and manipulated the bankruptcy system to hide the full scope of his assets. A forensic economist who testified during the prior damages trial in Texas estimated that Mr. Jones and Free Speech Systems were worth as much as $270 million together and that Infowars earned more than $64 million last year.
On his show on Infowars during the trial on Tuesday, Mr. Jones urged his viewers to give him financial support and buy collectible coins he was selling.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:31 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
In response to a series of questions from Mattei about whether he saw any actors at Sandy Hook that day and if the children were real, Aldenberg choked back tears, breathlessly saying: “It was awful. It was awful. It was awful.” He didn’t know who Alex Jones was that day, but Aldenberg is testifying now because of how Jones recast Sandy Hook as a hoax.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:25 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg is struggling to compose himself. He found teacher Vicki Soto’s body and saw what he thought was her cell phone next to her, “lighting up.”
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:16 p.m. ET
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Aldenberg says that by the time he entered the school, he understood that the active shooter situation was “done, it was over.” So, as he walks the jury through the photographs of the school, he is describing what he encountered in the aftermath of the attacks — starting with two women killed near the entrance. He soon learned they were the principal and the school psychologist.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:10 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Chris Mattei, the Sandy Hook families’ lawyer, is taking Aldenberg through the day of the shooting. He paused first, walked to the gallery and whispered to the families, cautioning them about the testimony to follow.
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Credit...Pool photo by H John Voorhees II
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 2:06 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
And we’re back in the courtroom from lunch recess. We are resuming with William Aldenberg, an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting in 2012 and was implicated in the conspiracy theories Jones endorsed. He is a plaintiff.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:31 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
The list of legal cases against Alex Jones is not short.
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Edgar Maddison Welch, 28 of Salisbury, N.C., as he surrendered to police in Washington in 2016. Welch said he was investigating a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza place. Credit...Sathi Soma, via Associated Press
The Sandy Hook lawsuits are the highest profile and potentially most costly in a string of legal actions taken against Alex Jones in recent years by people harmed by his conspiracy lies. Here are a few of them.
• In 2016, an Infowars video in which Mr. Jones falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats were trafficking children from a Washington pizzeria inspired Edgar Maddison Welch to enter the Comet Ping Pong restaurant during the dinner hour to “self-investigate” the bogus claim, firing a rifle in the process. No one was hurt, and Mr. Welch was sentenced to four years in federal prison. In 2017, Mr. Jones’s lawyer at the time, Mark Bailen, reached an agreement with the restaurant’s owner in which Mr. Jones aired a public retraction and removed videos from Infowars’ website airing his “Pizzagate” lies. (Mr. Welch was released in 2020.)
• A month after his public apology for his “Pizzagate” lies, Mr. Jones was sued by Chobani yogurt company, led by billionaire Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant committed to employing refugees in his plants. Mr. Jones in 2017 aired broadcasts falsely linking Chobani’s refugee employees in Twin Falls, Idaho, to crime and an increase in tuberculosis cases, accusing the company of “importing migrant rapists.” Mr. Jones’s lawyer at the time, Mr. Bailen, brokered another public retraction by Mr. Jones, and Chobani dropped the suit.
• In 2017, when a neo-Nazi attending the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., sped his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32, a former State Department employee, Brennan Gilmore, filmed and posted the attack. Infowars falsely accused Mr. Gilmore of being a C.I.A. officer who staged the attack to discredit President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Gilmore, subjected to death threats and online abuse, sued Infowars for defamation in 2018. Infowars settled the case for $50,000 this year, and acknowledged its role in the abuse. (This is described in the book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.”)
• In 2018, Infowars was sued for defamation by Marcel Fontaine, after the conspiracy theorist website wrongly accused him of being the gunman in the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Mr. Fontaine, who lived in Boston and had never been to Florida, was subjected to a torrent of threats. He died in a fire earlier this year, and his family is pursuing the lawsuit.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:13 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
We are breaking for lunch now. We will resume with Aldenberg’s testimony at 2 p.m.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:03 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
I’ve interviewed a number of the first responders who, like Aldenberg, were among the first on the scene. They often struggle, as Aldenberg is doing now, to speak about that day, much less what they saw.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 1:01 p.m. ET
Linda Qiu
Jones is now addressing his legal troubles on his show on Infowars, calling them “show trials” with predetermined outcomes. Jones is warning his viewers that “they’re coming for everybody” and he needs financial support to keep up his fight. Jones then transitions into advertising a collectable coin.
[x]
Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 12:56 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg was at a training near Newtown on Dec. 14, 2012, when a call came in about an active shooter at Sandy Hook school. He is having trouble maintaining his composure while recalling that morning.
***
Sept. 13, 2022, 12:55 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from the courtroom
Aldenberg is the only non-family member who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. He was targeted by conspiracy theorists after a bogus theory spread that he and one of the parents were the same person.