An attorney for the parents of students who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting questioned Alex Jones over his allegations that he is being tried in a “kangaroo court,” pushing back on the Infowars host’s claims that the judge presiding over his defamation trial is a “tyrant.”
Jones, a 48-year-old conspiracy peddler who started his career in the early 1990s on community access TV, was questioned during the opening moments of his testimony Thursday in his Connecticut case, in which he is being sued by eight additional Sandy Hook families following his jury trial in a Texas court last month.
“You’ve been calling it a kangaroo court yourself, right?” asked Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families who questioned Jones about a livestream on one of his websites that features an edited image of Judge Barbara Bellis with glowing red eyes.
ALEX JONES ORDERED TO PAY $4.1 MILLION TO SANDY HOOK PARENTS IN DEFAMATION CASE
“Yes,” Jones replied.
“And you’ve called the judge a tyrant?” Mattei asked.
“Yes,” Jones said.
Last month, a Texas jury decided Jones should pay $45.2 million in punitive damages to two parents of a victim of the Sandy Hook shooting over his promotion of false claims that the massacre was a hoax. But in reality, Jones could owe less than 10% of that amount because a Texas law caps punitive damages at $750,000 per parent.
However, the payment amount decided by the jury in the Connecticut trial could be substantially higher, given that the case involves more families and the state does not impose a cap on punitive damages.
Bellis issued a default ruling in November 2021 that Jones is liable for his false claims, meaning the jury will once again determine the damages awarded to the plaintiffs. A specific figure has not been cited in court, but an attorney for one of the families last week asked jurors to “send a message” to the public with their decision.
The plaintiffs in the Connecticut trial include the families of eight school shooting victims, school employees, and one FBI agent who responded at the scene in 2012. The lawsuits were consolidated into one when the trial commenced earlier this month.
Although Jones has admitted that calling the shooting a hoax was a false statement and has issued apologies, he maintained on Thursday that while he once claimed the parent of a deceased child “looked like he was acting,” he didn’t claim there were “actors.” And in a 2019 sworn deposition, Jones testified that a “form of psychosis” caused him to make his false claims.
Throughout the trial Thursday, Jones was repeatedly reminded by Bellis to obey the court’s rules, and the trial was interrupted numerous times by sidebars, or private discussions between the judge, Mattei, and Jones’s attorney Norm Pattis, who describes himself on Twitter as a “writer, contrarian, stand-up comic.”
Earlier in the day, Mattei asked Jones whether his “credibility” is the most important thing to him on his show Infowars.
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Jones responded that the most important thing to him is “crushing globalists.”
While Jones contends that he has lost viewers on his network in the years since his Sandy Hook conspiracies, Mattei estimates that nearly 550 million people have witnessed Jones’s claims on social media alone.
