March 29, 2024

Truth in a Post-Truth Era: Sandy Hook Families Sue Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist

Mr. Jones claims First Amendment protection for his endeavors, but the lawsuits challenge that defense. “The First Amendment has never protected demonstrably false, malicious statements like the defendants’,” the suit filed on Wednesday says, referencing New York Times Company v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court case upholding freedom of the press.

Defamation cases are difficult to win. Lawyers for the victims’ families “will have to show that the statements were false statements of fact, not opinion, and that Alex Jones was at least negligent, and did not take the steps an ordinary reporter would take to corroborate facts,” said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a free-speech advocacy group. The legal burden on the families will be heavier yet if they are deemed to be public figures.

Mr. Jones, 44, grew up in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall, the son of a dentist and a homemaker. He told an interviewer in 2011 that he was profoundly shaped by reading his father’s copy of “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” a 1971 best-seller by Gary Allen, a John Birch Society spokesman and speechwriter for George Wallace, the former Alabama governor, during his presidential run.

Mr. Jones got his media start as a community college student in Austin in the early 1990s, when he repeatedly insisted on community access cable that the government was behind the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Distracted by his mission to warn of the dangers of the American government, Mr. Jones dropped out of college and founded InfoWars in 1999, in time to call the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks an “inside job.”

Mr. Jones might have remained a peripheral conspiracy theorist had it not been for Mr. Trump, who appeared on Mr. Jones’s radio show during the 2016 campaign, pledging, “I will never let you down” and “we’ll be speaking a lot.” Mr. Jones’s following surged.

The Texas suits focus on Mr. Jones’s comments over the previous year, including a segment on his radio show last year titled “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed.” Mark Bankston, a partner in the Houston law firm Farrar Ball, who is leading the team representing Mr. Heslin, Mr. Pozner and Ms. De La Rosa, said the firm’s young lawyers grew up listening to Mr. Jones’s radio show, and found him an amusing, if weird, local character.

But now Mr. Bankston has a different perspective. “For Alex Jones, it appears that the only real thing on his mind is his business,” Mr. Bankston said. “And if you threatened that, you can make him understand that these kinds of practices have a cost. And if that message goes out to others like him, that’s a victory for these families.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/politics/alex-jones-trump-sandy-hook.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Speak Your Mind