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| Photo Credit: AP. |
WATERBURY, Conn. (AP) — A defiant Alex Jones showed up at a Connecticut courthouse Tuesday declaring his innocence despite already being found liable for spreading the lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax.
A jury
seated about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Sandy Hook in Waterbury Superior
Court has been hearing evidence for a week to determine how much Jones must pay
the families of eight victims and an FBI agent who was among the first to
respond to the shooting that took the lives of 20 first graders and six
educators.
Jones spent
just a few minutes at the courthouse, arriving at about 9:30 a.m., accompanied
by one of his attorneys and repeating declarations he made last week on his
Infowars web show that the proceeding is nothing more than a “show trial.”
“This is a
travesty of justice and this judge is a tyrant,” Jones said outside the
courthouse. “This judge is ordering me to say that I’m guilty and to say that
I’m a liar. None of that is true. I was not wrong about Sandy Hook on purpose.
I questioned it.”
Jones left a
short time later, indicating he would not be testifying on Tuesday.
Judge
Barbara Bellis found Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems,
liable by default last year without a trial, as punishment for what she called
his repeated failures to turn over documents to the Sandy Hook lawyers.
Jones has
complained that he was found “guilty” without trials. There is no guilt in
civil trials like this one in Connecticut, or one last month in Texas where a
jury awarded nearly $50 million in damages to the parents of one of the children
killed in the shooting.
The judge
“has now ordered me to not say I’m innocent and ordered me to say that I have
not profited from Sandy Hook,” Jones said Tuesday. “That’s ordering me to
perjure myself. I will not perjure myself under the orders of a judge.”
Jones is not
being allowed to present defenses arguing he is not liable, including that the
First Amendment gave him the right to say the shooting didn’t happen and raise
questions about it.
The plaintiffs
say Jones’ promotion of the hoax lie on his Infowars show led to the families
being threatened and harassed by deniers of the shooting. They say they’ve
endured death threats and in-person harassment, video recording by strangers
and abusive comments on social media. Some families moved out of Newtown to
avoid the harassment.
And they say
while Jones talked about the shooting, sales of the dietary supplements,
clothing, food and other items he hawks on his show surged. A representative for
Free Speech Systems testified last week that she believed Jones and his company
made at least $100 million in revenues since the school shooting.
On Tuesday,
the jury heard testimony by Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and cybersecurity
expert, who spoke about how the internet and social media are used by
governments and organizations, including terrorist groups, to spread
misinformation and call people to action. He also talked about how Jones stoked
anger and fear on Infowars.
Watts said that
by the end of 2012, around the time of the school shooting, Jones and Infowars
had the infrastructure in place to have far-reaching influence: multiple
websites, a large amount of content and a “massive” Infowars audience.
“To have 49
million users in any given year is a massive audience,” Watts said.
By the end
of 2013, the Infowars website audience had ballooned to 73 million. Those
numbers are from data compiled in Google Analytics reports run by Infowars employees
and shown to the jury.
Joshua Koskoff,
a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, showed Watts and the jury a video of some
of Jones’ first comments about the school shooting, on the day it happened.
“They are
going to come after our guns, look for mass shootings,” Jones said, referring
to his conspiracy theory that mass shootings are staged to spur gun control.
“They are coming. They are coming. They are coming.”
Jones adds:
“They’re declaring war on the Second Amendment period.”
Watts said
he believed Jones was trying to spark anger and fear among his audience and
create an us versus them narrative aimed at building his audience and
increasing product sales.
Jones has
painted the trials as a conspiracy by Democrats and the media to take away gun
rights, put him out of business and silence him.
Jones, who
has said over the past few years that he believes the shooting did happen, also
bashed the Texas trial on his show. Under oath and facing a jury in Austin, he
said he realized the hoax lies were irresponsible and hurt people’s feelings, and
he was sorry for that.
This story
has corrected two quotes by Alex Jones. He said the judge “has now ordered me
to not say I’m innocent,” instead of “has now ordered me to not say I’m not
innocent.” Jones also said “I will not perjure myself under the orders of a
judge,” instead of “I will not perjure myself under the order of a judge,” in
the same paragraph.
Associated
Press writers Michael Hill and Pat Eaton-Robb contributed to this report.