The day after the parents of two Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims sued InfoWars host Alex Jones for defamation, the conspiracy theorist attempted to claim that he was the person who was actually being defamed. “You’re allowed to question things in America,” he declared during his midday internet broadcast on Wednesday. “That’s not defamation. But what is defamation is to file lawsuits that say I said things I didn’t say, and then put me and my whole family through the ringer and lie about us and hold us up against dead children and say basically we hate their families, we hate the children.”
Aside from dedicating nearly 20 minutes of his InfoWars program to the lawsuit, Jones also took to Twitter to decry it as “anti-free speech” litigation. He also posted a rather odd photoshop with the caption, “Despite the fact infowars is under massive attack from the corrupt establishment and the world is on the brink of total war Alex has a Zen like ability to relax.” The tweet, which was evidently written by someone else due to its use of the third person, tried to make a joke about the photo being “leaked… by CNN,” implying it was nothing more than fake news.
In response, the lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents, Wesley Todd Ball told Bloomberg, “Alex Jones’s latest comments show he has zero respect for the torment he’s putting these victims through. His comments are nothing more than a lie on top of a lie. They are void of an apology.” Whether or not Jones decides to stick to his current line of public defense against the Sandy Hook parents’ lawsuit remains to be seen, especially since the conspiracy theorist’s track record isn’t so great.
For starters, despite claiming the “[lawsuit says] I said things I didn’t say,” Jones did in fact accuse the Newtown victims and survivors of being “crisis actors,” a claim he later repeated for Stoneman Douglas survivor turned activist David Hogg. What’s more, he was forced to settle a previous lawsuit that resulted in an awkward public apology on his program. Will that be happening again soon?
(Via Bloomberg)