Austin, Texas-
More to the right conspiracy theory Alex Jones made it through the first of several trials against him that could decimate his personal fortune and media empire in the usual way: loud, aggressive and talking about conspiracies both inside and outside the courtroom.
It’s business as usual for the deep-voiced, barrel-chested Jones. But by court standards, his erratic and sometimes disrespectful behavior is unusual and potentially fraught with legal process.
Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, were ordered Thursday to pay $4.11 million in compensatory damages to the parents of six-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was killed with 19 other first graders and six educators in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. And much more he could be on the way.
Although the more than $4 million was significantly less than the $150 million in damages sought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the jury meets again Friday to hear about Jones’s finances before deciding on punitive damages.
Jones faces two more Sandy Hook lawsuits to determine damages later this year: one for the parents of a 6-year-old boy in an Austin court and another for eight families in Connecticut.
Heslin and Lewis testified that Jones’ constant push for false claims that the shooting was a hoax or staged turned the last decade into a “living hell” of death threats, online abuse, and unrelenting trauma inflicted by Jones and his associates. followers.
After years of false claims, Jones admitted under oath that the shooting was “100 percent real” and even shook hands with the parents.
But the bombastic version of Jones was always lurking below the surface, or even on full display away from the courthouse.
During a break on the first day, he held an impromptu press conference just a few meters from the courtroom doors, declaring the proceedings a “kangaroo court” and a “show trial” defending his fight for the freedom of expression under the First Amendment. On the first day, he arrived at the courthouse with “Save the 1st” written on silver tape over his mouth.
When he arrived at the courthouse, it was always with a security detail of three or four guards. Jones, who was not in court for the verdict, often skipped testimony to appear on his daily Infowars show, where attacks on judge and jury continued. During one show, Jones said the jury was made up of a group of people who “don’t know what planet they live on.”
That clip was shown to the jury. So was a snapshot from his Infowars website showing Judge Maya Guerra Gamble engulfed in flames. She laughed at that.
Jones was only slightly less combative in court. He was the only witness to testify in his defense and Gamble knew he had the potential to go off the rails. He warned Jones’s attorneys even before it began that if he tried to turn it into a performance, he would clear the courtroom and shut down the live broadcast of the trial to the world.
When Jones arrived for Lewis’s testimony, Gamble asked him if he was chewing gum, a violation of a strict rule in his courtroom. He had already scolded his lawyer Andino Reynal several times.
That led to a testy exchange. Jones said he wasn’t chewing gum. Gamble said that he could see his mouth moving. Jones opened wide and leaned across the defense table to show him a gap in his mouth where a tooth had been extracted. Jones insisted that he was just massaging the hole with his tongue.
“Don’t show me,” the judge said.
Some legal experts said they were surprised by Jones’s behavior and questioned whether it was a calculated risk to increase his appeal to fans.
“It’s the strangest behavior I’ve ever seen in a trial,” said Barry Covert, a First Amendment attorney from Buffalo, New York. “In my opinion, Jones is a giant who makes money, he’s crazy as a fox,” Covert said. “The bigger the show, the better.”
Kevin Goldberg, a First Amendment specialist at the Maryland-based Liberty Forum, said it was hard for him to imagine what Jones might be thinking and what benefit he might gain from his behavior.
“I don’t know what it’s designed for, other than being on the Alex Jones brand,” Goldberg said. “This appears to be a man who has built his brand … by disrespecting government institutions … and this court.”
Defendants at trial are often given some wiggle room because the stakes are high: prison in criminal cases and, in Jones’s civil trial, potential financial ruin. Monetary penalties or even post-trial contempt charges are also a possibility.
Gamble had to be careful how he handled everything, Covert said.
“Jones’s strange behavior is putting the judge in a very difficult box,” Covert said. “She doesn’t want to show up to put her finger on the scales of justice.”
Jones skipped Heslin’s testimony when he described to the jury that he was holding his dead son in his arms with a “bullet hole in his head.”
Heslin said he wanted to confront Jones face-to-face, calling his absence that day “cowardly.” Instead, Jones appeared on his daily broadcast.
Jones was in the room when Lewis took the stand, sitting just 10 feet away as she looked directly at him.
“My son existed. I’m not a ‘deep state,'” he said of the conspiracy theory of a shadowy network of federal workers running the government.
“I know you know that,” Lewis said.
When Lewis asked Jones if he thought she was an actress, Jones replied “No”, but Gamble cut him off and scolded him for speaking out of character.
At the end of that day, Jones and the parents shook hands. Lewis even gave him a sip of water to help calm a persistent cough that Jones said was caused by a laryngeal tear. His attorney, Wesley Ball, quickly stepped in to break it up.
“No,” Ball snapped at Jones, “you are NOT going to do this.”
Jones was the only witness in his defense. His testimony pushed court rules so often that plaintiffs openly questioned whether Jones and his attorneys were trying to sabotage the court and force a mistrial. They filed a sanctions motion against him after Jones claimed he was bankrupt, which the attorneys dispute was off limits in testimony.
At one point, Jones seemed stunned when family attorneys announced that Jones’s legal team had mistakenly sent them two years’ worth of data from his cell phone, a massive data dump they said should have occurred at discovery. , but it wasn’t. They said he showed that he had been receiving text messages and emails about Sandy Hook and his media company’s finances that he had not turned over due to court orders.
“This is your Perry Mason moment,” Jones snapped.
The plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Bankston, said Thursday that the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol had requested those materials and that he intended to give them to them.
The Jan. 6 committee first subpoenaed Jones in November, demanding a statement and documents related to his efforts to spread misinformation about the 2020 election and a rally on the day of the attack.
During the trial, Jones often spoke out of turn and was interrupted when he veered into conspiracies, ranging from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to a bogus United Nations effort on global depopulation. He went on to question some of the most important events and important government institutions in American life.
“This,” the judge told him, “is not your show.”