Alex Jones continues to have a very bad week. Yesterday, the jury in his first of at least three damages trials ordered him to pay $4.1 million to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Lewis, who was murdered in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting when he was six years old.
Jones spent years falsely claiming the 2012 shooting was a hoax, defaming the families of murdered children and opening them up to harassment, threats, and doxxing from his followers. The jury issued the $4.1 million verdict on Thursday, which is only a tiny fraction of the $150 million sought by the family. However, the jury isn’t done. That first verdict was for compensatory damages. They’ll be back Friday to issue punitive damages.
Meanwhile, the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection has put in a request for Jones’ texts and emails after his own lawyers accidentally sent the entire contents of his phone to opposing counsel.
The Sandy Hook family’s attorney, Mark Bankston, dropped the bombshell in court on Wednesday, calling Jones out for the many lies he’d told under oath and revealing that he knew they were lies because he had those messages—a fact Jones clearly was not aware of until that moment.
Jones was a relatively key player in the January 6 insurrection—even being present at the rally beforehand—and the election fraud conspiracies that led up to it. He was questioned by the House committee earlier this year but spent most of that time refusing to answer questions. As he himself put it during a broadcast of his own show, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment “almost 100 times.”
Jones said at the time that he believed the committee already had access to his phone because they showed him some of his text messages with some of the rally organizers. But clearly they don’t have everything Bankston has because he says they, possibly along with other “various federal agencies and law enforcement,” have asked him to turn over the phone contents. And apparently, Jones’ attorneys haven’t done anything to try to stop him.
Speaking to Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, Bankston said Thursday, “Absent a ruling from you saying you cannot do that … I intend to do so immediately following this hearing.”
“I believe that there is absolutely nothing, nothing, that [Jones’ attorney, Andino] Reynal has done to fulfill his obligations to protect his client and prevent me from doing that,” he said.
Are Alex Jones’s lawyers just really, really bad at their jobs or do we think they hate him as much as the rest of us do? It’s genuinely hard to tell at this point.
(image: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
