The parents of two children who were killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School have filed a defamation lawsuit against Alex Jones, the Infowars host and conspiracy theorist who has claimed the 2012 shooting was a “giant hoax” and “completely fake.”
The lawsuits were filed Monday in Travis County District Court in Austin, Texas, where Jones lives. Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose 6-year-old son Noah Pozner was killed, and Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Heslin was killed, filed the pair of lawsuits seeking at least $1 million in damages.
“The statements were a continuation and elaboration of a years-long campaign to falsely attack the honesty of the Sandy Hook parents, casting them as participants in a ghastly conspiracy and cover-up,” the parents said in their lawsuits, according to reports.
Jones has suggested some of the parents of those killed in the Sandy Hook shooting are actors who were part of a scheme to pass stricter gun laws. He has also called into question the “official story” of the 2012 massacre, which left 20 children and six adults dead.
The lawsuits focus specifically on remarks Jones has made over the past year, according to the New York Times.
During one segment on his radio show broadcast in April 2017, called “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed,” Jones commented on an interview CNN’s Anderson Cooper conducted with De La Rosa in Newtown, Conn.
Jones suggested a distortion in the video of the interview meant the two were actors and the interview filmed in a studio.
“When [Cooper] turns, his nose disappears repeatedly because the green screen isn’t set right,” Jones said.
Then, following a segment from NBC’s “Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly,” which featured an interview Kelly conducted with Heslin, Jones and an Infowars reporter suggested Heslin was lying after Heslin told Kelly he “held my son with a bullet hole through his head.”
The Infowars reporter, Owen Shroyer, said in a video a week later that was “not possible,” since the medical examiner reportedly showed photos of the victims to their parents.
Jones later replayed the video on his show.
“The stuff I found was they never let them see their bodies,” he said. “That’s kind of what’s weird about this. But maybe they did.”
A Florida woman who thinks the Newtown shooting was a hoax was sentenced to five months in prison last year after making death threats against Pozner.
Jones is also facing another defamation lawsuit filed by a Massachusetts man he wrongly accused of being a suspect in the Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.
