Front Burner - The chaotic trial of InfoWars’ Alex Jones

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

For many years, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has touted that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a fake. The parents of its victims have been targeted because of Jones's claims that they were "crisis actors" in a plot to force gun control. Now, two of those parents are suing the InfoWars host for compensation and punitive damages. Today Dan Solomon, senior editor at Texas Daily, tells us more about the surprising turns that went down in the trial and what's at stake for Jones's conspiracy media empire.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jonathan Mopetze, and for Jemmy Poisson. Alex Jones, founder of InfoWars, is known for spreading far-right conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. We're not covering Pizzagate enough, even though we covered it every day,

to expose the Satanism and the occult and the code words for pedophilia. Are those about Barack Obama's family history? You're not born in Kenya. You're really born in Hawaii on the main city-based island. They're in Honolulu to Frank Marshall Davis. Right. And your grandfather's CIA, your mother's CIA, that's all been declassified. You're this cutout person. His mom was a CIA? Oh, yeah. This week, Jones was in a Texas court after he was found liable for defamation for making false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin lost their six-year-old son at Sandy Hook. They want Jones to pay $150 million in damages

because Jones called the worst school shooting in U.S. history a false flag. And that is a inside job right there either way you cut it. And claimed it was a fake and that the parents were part of a government plot. Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured. As of Thursday evening, the jury had awarded the parents more than $4 million in compensatory damages. But before this verdict, the trial has been, well, chaotic.

With Jones, a guy who's used to bellowing at the top of his lungs, I'm sick of it! I'm tired of it right now! Struggling at times to adapt to courtroom decorum. This is not your show. You need to slow down and not take what you see as opportunities to further the message you're wanting to further. He's been caught out. So you did get my text messages and said you didn't. Nice trick. Yes, Mr. Johnson. Indeed.

And there have been bombshells. And in a surprising turn, the lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents said Jones' own lawyers had made a big mistake. Your attorney's messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you've sent for the past two years. I'm here with Dan Solomon, the senior editor at Texas Monthly, who has been following the trial closely. He's going to walk us through what happened in court this week. Hey, Dan, thanks so much for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Okay, so this is a defamation trial, but I was wondering if you could kind of connect the dots for me. How does Alex Jones saying that Sandy Hook was fake mean that the parents of the victims were defamed? So it's kind of a complicated answer. It's kind of a complicated answer. Intuitively, though, it makes a bit of sense if you think that, okay, if Sandy Hook was fake, and you have these parents who are saying that their child was murdered at Sandy Hook, those people must be liars. And that's kind of the thrust of it, that these people are not who they say they are. Jones has this theory around crisis actors. Basically, I'll tell you the crisis actor story, because it's a pretty good example of how he is not very curious or very informed, but likes to find

things that confirm what he wants to believe are true. There was a company, I believe out of Colorado, that did staging of mass casualty events to train law enforcement, to train first responders, to train people who would have to be useful in those situations. And they had what they called crisis actors, which were people who would pretend to be the people who were in that situation. And the crisis actors would perform and then the police and the paramedics and etc could come in and do their job in an environment that simulated a real shooting and so alex jones learned that crisis actors existed and thought okay well that's what's going on in all of these mass shootings they're all actors

these kids look like actors from some saturday morning special and obviously that's not true but he latched on to that and then when when it came to Sandy Hook, he became convinced or decided at least to convince his audience that the parents in that situation were crisis actors, that there were no kids killed. Or sometimes he thinks that there were kids killed. Sometimes he thinks there weren't. He likes multiple choice scenarios for reality. likes multiple choice scenarios for reality. So the parents say that Jones's constant ranting about Sandy Hook has had real terrible consequences on their lives. Can you walk us through that? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, there are a couple of things going on.

One are the very real physical consequences to their safety, which is that Alex Jones is a big audience and those people are not all particularly stable. And so there are people who are convinced that they are crisis actors who threaten them, who drive by their house and take photos, who upload maps of where they get their mail. In Florida, the Department of Justice has just announced the arrest of this Tampa, Florida woman who, believing like Alex Jones, that the deaths at Sandy Hook were faked.

She threatened to kill one of the bereaved parents of a Sandy Hook victim. So apparently Richards is accused of telling the parent, you're going to die, death is coming to you real soon, and also look behind you, it's death. It's stuff like that that is really a serious risk to them, because they don't know who these people are, or if they're armed, or how they are going to react if they are convinced that these are people who, you know, are part of a conspiracy to take away

their guns. So that's the first part of the damage. The other part, I think this is something that the jury seem to be very interested in, is the emotional and psychological damage, the inability to grieve a terrible loss if you are constantly being told that other people don't think it even happened. It has, in my more vulnerable moments, felt like a complete denial of my life. You know, one thing that really struck me as I was watching the trial is when Neil Heslin, he's the father of the six-year-old boy who was killed in this case, he was talking about how difficult it was that there were people who thought that his son was still alive. That is an indication that he didn't exist and he didn't live. He didn't live. I was blessed with six and a half years.

And I kind of had this moment where I was like, man, I'm sure he would much rather live in Alex Jones's reality where this didn't happen. And he didn't lose his six-year-old than in the one where he's, you know, still trying to properly grieve. Now there, there are a series of cases that led to this, to this moment. So what is actually happening in the courtroom this week? Yeah, this is a really complicated question. So the cases started, I want to say four years ago, maybe three and a half, a long time ago. I remember I was covering hearings for this in 2018. And this wasn't the only case that's been filed. There was another case by another parent that filed in Texas with

the same lawyer. And then there are plaintiffs in Connecticut who filed with a different counsel up in Connecticut. And so all of that is just layer one. Layer two is that over the many years this case has been going on, or that these cases have been going on, the courts have ordered discovery materials, have ordered infowars to present a corporate representative for depositions who's supposed to know everything that the corporation could reasonably be expected to know. That's usually either a lawyer or a longtime high-level employee who has heaps of institutional knowledge. And in this case, they didn't do either. They didn't comply with many of the discovery requests. There are all sorts of documents, videos, et cetera, that they just never provided,

even though they were ordered to multiple times. And eventually the judge who's currently overseeing the case, her name's Maya Garrett Gamble, she just said, okay, you have had so many opportunities to comply with discovery. You still have an opportunity to comply with discovery. You're not doing it. So you're not presenting a defense of this case, which means that by default you lose because the plaintiffs can't make their case if you don't present them with the evidence that you're required to present for them to make theirs. And so that was it. That was the default judgment meant that he lost. He lost defamation. He lost intentional infliction of emotional distress. And that happened in the case that has been going on the past two weeks in Austin.

It also happened in the cases in Connecticut and the second case that's going to be coming in Austin and a third case that's going to be happening in Austin that's not with a Sandy Hope plaintiff, a plaintiff on a different defamation and emotional distress charge. But that's basically how we got here. And then once that was determined, it's still a jury's responsibility to determine the damages in the case. And so the jury was impaneled to figure out, OK, we know that he did it because the judge has ordered that. Now, what does he have to pay? How is he being punished for this? How is the family being compensated? And that's what this trial is about. OK, so let's talk about what went down in court this week, starting with the family side. You mentioned Neil Heslin, whose six-year-old son was killed at Sandy Hook. He testified.

And Alex Jones wasn't even there in court, right? He was actually across town broadcasting his radio show. And during that broadcast, he actually calls out the father, Neil Heslin. I'll just say, because I've got to be honest, he's slow, okay? And his ex-wife is not. I don't think he's stupid. I'm just saying he's... I've got family members that are really smart in a lot of ways, but they're just real kind of quiet and have this way about them, and they

move at a different pace. They're fast in some ways and slow in others, and he's... I mean, I think Heslin acts like somebody on the spectrum. Yeah, that happened. He sure did do that. He accused Neil Heslin of being slow, accused him of being on the autism spectrum. I mean, there's nothing wrong with either of those things, but he didn't mean them in a neutral way. He meant them to be disparaging. And that clip eventually got played for the jury who had just seen Neil Heslin testify, you know, a couple hours before. So this is not your conventional way of endearing yourself to a jury who ultimately holds your fate in their hands.

Especially a jury that's there to decide if you defamed the guy. Now, Jones will eventually make his way to the courtroom. And I saw this incredible moment where the mother of a victim met face-to-face with Jones. And I understand that wasn't even supposed to happen. Can you describe that moment in the courtroom for me? So there were two moments

where they really came into direct confrontation with one another. One was during her testimony when she began addressing him directly during her testimony. Her lawyer would be asking her questions, and she kind of ignored those questions because she had stuff she wanted to say to Alex Jones. because she had stuff she wanted to say to Alex Jones. Jesse was real. I am a real mom. There's nothing out there. Nothing.

There's records of Jesse's birth, of me. And there's nothing that you could have found. It's just not true. I know you know that. That's the problem. I know you know that. And you keep saying it. Why?

For money? Because you made a lot of money while you said it. So that happened first. And then after his testimony at the end of the day on Tuesday, he's been complaining about having a torn larynx and has been coughing on the stand, and she handed him a bottle of water. And she seems like a very genuine, very sincere, very compassionate person. So she handed him a bottle of water and he took it. And there was a handshake between him and Scarlett Lewis, the mother and Neil Heslin. And he apologized and said, I failed your son. And that was around the time that the plaintiff's attorneys came over and saw what Jones was doing and said, this isn't how this goes. And, you know, one of them, the lead attorney in the case, Mark Bankston, he's been needling Jones for a while now.

And, you know, he asked, are you going to apologize for calling him slow on the air, too? And it became a confrontation. My sense of it is that Heslin and Lewis did not particularly crave an apology from Alex Jones. They had talked about that many times on the stand, how an apology wasn't worth anything to them because he keeps doing this. But I do think that, you know, they are polite, friendly people who are open to having a human moment with someone, even if it's someone who they who's done horrible things to them. And I think that their lawyers thought, you know what, this is not this is going to be a propaganda clip for Alex Jones if this continues and decided to stop. You know, that's really interesting because Jones also made a big admission about what he actually believes about Sandy Hook. It's 100% real, as I said on the radio yesterday. And as I said here yesterday, it's 100% real. Kind of. I don't want to read too much into that. He said, yes, absolutely, it 100% happened.

But if he goes on for another 20 minutes, he's going to say that it didn't. I mean, you know, he's done that before. You mentioned that you've been following him in court a fair bit. And I think, you know, everyone has seen Jones's show or seen clips from the show. You know, he's kind of a wild guy. There's lots of screaming and ranting and hyperventilating. What has his demeanor been like in the courtroom? Ranting and screaming and hyperventilating mostly. I mean, he's, you know, say what you will about the guy. He's not an actor.

Like, this is not an act. The first trial that I covered for him was about five years ago. And it was a custody trial with his ex-wife to determine who would get custody of their three kids. And in that trial, he's trying to, you know, keep custody of his children. And it took about, you know, 10 minutes for the lawyer to bait him into ranting about George Soros. So he's just, he's just who he is, you know, the guy on the show, I've never seen him anything other than that, you know, I've lived in Austin for a long time, and he's a presence here, you know, we sometimes I'll be at a restaurant and Alex Jones

will walk in and he's more polite. He's kind of a charming guy when he's not trying to confront somebody, which is what his whole brand is built on. But he's still big and sweaty and angry and moving a mile a minute and blustery. That's just who he is. And it's made for some, some pretty surreal moments in the courtroom. There was this weird moment involving his teeth. Yeah. Yeah. That was weird, man. I mean, that was, you know, the, the judge has really strict rules on decorum. She cares about that a great deal. And Jones's lawyer chews nicotine gum between, you know, because you have to go through a metal detector and stuff to get into the courtroom. So he chews nicotine gum when they take breaks.

And when he comes back, he doesn't always spit it out. And she's had to remind him many times to spit out his gum. And, you know, it's not a good look for a lawyer. And then she saw Jones doing something with his with his tongue that looked like chewing gum. Spit your gum out, Mr. Jones. It's not gum. What is it?

He said, I'm not chewing gum. I had a tooth extracted and it hurts. I've been chewing on my tongue. You want to see it? And she's like, no, I don't need to look into your mouth. And he was going to show it to her anyway. So he opened his mouth and showed it to her honor in the middle of her courtroom. I don't want to see the inside of your mouth.

Hold on. It's all gone. Hold. Sit down. Yeah, I don't know. It's, again, not necessarily something you do when you're trying to show the world that you're a serious person. All right. Let's get to the bombshell revelation.

Tell me about the phones and emails and texts. Yeah. Oh, boy. Basically, what happened is that Andino Ranal, who is Jones's lawyer, uploaded to a Dropbox that the two sides have been using to share documents, a couple of documents that he shouldn't have. One of them was several gigabytes worth of information from a cell phone that Jones had, I think from 2018 to the end of 2020. Mr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago, 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you've sent for the past two years and when informed did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way and as of two days ago it fell free and clear into my possession and that is how i know you lied to me when you

said you didn't have a text message about samuel did you know that i see i told you the truth this is your perry mason. I gave them my phone. Mr. Jones, you need to answer the question. Did you know this happened? No, I didn't know this happened. But, I mean, I told you. I gave them the phone over. And you said in your deposition you searched your phone.

You said you pulled down the text, did the service function for Sandy Hook. That's what you said, Mr. Jones, correct? And I had several different phones with this number, but I did, yeah. So, you know, a pretty significant chunk of time with a lot of information that normally the attorneys would have no right to or access to because it's got nothing to do with this case. no right to or access to because it's got nothing to do with this case. The plaintiff's attorneys are required under Texas law to notify the opposing counsel that they received this information in error. And they did so. The opposing counsel has 10 days to say, I'm so sorry, I need that back immediately. It was an error. And then they have to give it to them and destroy their copies of it. Jones's attorney didn't respond to that request within those 10 days. And now it's in possession of the, uh, of the

plaintiffs. So it's got lots of information that is, I'm super curious about it. And apparently the January 6th committee is, is pretty interested in it as well. Um, you know, I, I talked to Mark Bankston, the plaintiff's attorney who received it. and he said that, you know, he's going to go through and find anything that might be useful to law enforcement and pass that on to them, anything that might be newsworthy and pass that on to us in the media. And we'll see what it says. You know, he's not going to release the whole thing. I wanted him to because I'm nosy. him to because I'm nosy. But there are certainly like, we heard today that there are text messages between Jones and Roger Stone, who's a pretty big player in the January 6th stuff. And the fact that this phone doesn't appear to include details from January 6th itself isn't necessarily relevant

because basically everything from November 2020 to the end of that year is pretty interesting to the January 6th committee. And when the lawyer for the parents, when he confronted Jones with the text messages, he asked Jones, do you know what perjury is? What was the significance of that question? So this goes back to the discovery issues that I talked about a minute ago. Jones didn't comply with discovery requests. He was supposed to provide all text messages he had exchanged regarding Sandy Hook.

He swore in a deposition, which is a sworn testimony, that he never had any text messages about Sandy Hook. Then Bengston gets his phone, and he goes through it, and he searches Sandy Hook. And sure enough, there are text messages about Sandy Hook. Then Bengston gets his phone, and he goes through it, and he searches Sandy Hook, and sure enough, there are text messages about Sandy Hook. Mr. Jones, in discovery, you were asked, do you have Sandy Hook text messages on your phone? And you said no, correct? You said that under oath, didn't you?

I mean, if I was mistaken, I was mistaken, but you got the messages right there. You know what it is, right? I just want to make sure the message. It was right there. You know what perjury is, right? I just want to make sure you know before we go any further. You know what it is? Yes, I do. So when he asked him, did you give me all of the texts about Sandy Hook? You know what perjury is. What he was saying is, I caught you.

I mean, that was it. He was saying, you lied to me. You were under oath at the time. I don't know if he's going to be, like, I don't know if he's actually in trouble for perjury. Texas courts don't tend to be interested in taking up perjury charges based on civil trials. This is obviously really high profile and a pretty unique situation, so who knows? But that was what he was getting at there, is that you lied under oath, you said you didn't have any of this this and I've got it right here.

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I'm obviously not a lawyer, but it does sound, based on your description of Jones' demeanor in court and what he's been up to, that he has not made life easy for his defense team. I mean, when he wasn't in court, he's broadcasting about the case. He's even talking about the jury. I mean, half that jury panel does not know who I am. So it's people who live in all these different bubbles. And there's the bubbles that are awake and the bubbles that are questioning. But then there's the blue city bubbles where people do not know what planet they are on.

So what are the arguments being made that he shouldn't have to pay the $150 million in damages? So the argument that his attorney made, and this is kind of the only argument that he really has available to him, is that for compensatory damages, his argument was that no matter how bad you feel for these people, Alex Jones didn't do $75 million worth of damage to them that they need to be compensated for, and he doesn't need to be punished $75 million for what he did. That number is ridiculous and not tied to anything. And that was basically the case. And that's usually a compelling case to a Texas jury. Texas juries are generally pretty stingy. We don't like to give big dollar amounts. We've got decades of kind of soft propagandizing about tort reform, and that's why our doctors are too

expensive and things like that. So yeah, that was the case that he made is that you can be mad at Alex Jones, but he didn't do that much damage to these people. Maybe if you want to kick them a little bit of money to cover their therapy bills, fine. He doesn't think that he should, but that was the argument. But that the millions and millions was ridiculous. There was never going to be a $150 million verdict in this case from a Texas jury. That wasn't going to happen. But the numbers say that they didn't find that argument particularly persuasive because, yeah, I mean, for a Travis County, Texas jury, $4.1 million without any provable economic damages. They can't say, oh, we lost this much money in lost wages. We lost this much money in doctor's bills. They can't really say that. So that much money just on faith that this

is what it cost them, this is how it hurt them, is pretty big. One of the other interesting things that emerged from this accidental exchange of information between the defense and the plaintiffs was we kind of got a peek inside the financials of InfoWars. Tell me a little bit about what that told us. Yeah, that's wild. So I've been, you know, up until a couple of months ago, we never had any sense of the financials of InfoWars. I've been trying through lots of different, you know, ways to try and get some insight into how much money they actually made. And we saw that they had some really good days, especially when things were happening in the news that made them interesting. When the 2016 Republican convention happened, we saw that they made a lot of money that day. When the first debate between Trump and Clinton happened, they made money. When the Access Hollywood tape came

out, they made money. And so we knew where it was through the end of 2018. And then in 2018, they also got deplatformed at the end of the year. They got kicked off of YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, et cetera. And once that happened, we had no idea if that affected their financials or not. With this text exchange showing that he made $800,000 in a day. That was better than most of the days he had when he was still on those platforms. So it tells us that, yeah, the deplatforming wasn't that bad for him financially. And he had testified that it had been horrible for them financially before he saw that text. He insisted on the stand that that $800,000 in a day, that was a really special day. It was an unusual day, but I don't know. Come on. We'll see. He's not the most credible witness. And part of that money, right, is being made, if only indirectly, off the backs of the Sandy

Hook hoax. Yeah. I mean, that's the argument that the plaintiffs are making is that when Sandy Hook happened, he didn't have his big supplement shop. He wasn't making huge amounts of money every day. And then Sandy Hook happens, he's the, you know, kind of the leading voice in the conspiracy theory world around, you know, the most prominent voice, I should say, around Sandy Hook trutherism. And so he ends up making a lot of money and elevating his profile. And so the argument is, well, man, you started talking all this stuff about Sandy Hook, and then you started making a whole bunch of money. And, you know, whose money should that be, really? And that's what the jury, when they hear the arguments for the punitive damages,

will decide. just roll the sign. All right, so let's get to what could happen on Friday. The jury came back with an award on Thursday of, like you said, compensatory jammies of just over $4 million. What can we expect to happen on Friday when it comes to the punitive damages? So we don't know for sure. Juries are very weird. But we do know that it's usually a higher number in punitive damages than compensatory damages. Usually, if the jury finds, punitive damages than compensatory damages. Usually if the jury finds, okay, you hurt these people worth $4 billion, then they're mad at you. And if they're mad at you, they don't have to attach that number to a specific damage the way they do with compensatory damages. They can say, okay, we're going to look at your net worth. And that's what we're going to hear is going to be an

expert testifying to Jonesy's net worth. And then they're going to decide, OK, how much do we want to punish this guy? And Texas law limits the punitive damages to a multiplier of about 10 times. So they could come back tomorrow and say $40 million. And that's a possibility. We don't know another four or anything in between really four and 40 is a good guess. But they're going to come back and award another large chunk of money and almost certainly pushing this into the double digits, maybe significantly into double digits.

And once that decision about the punitive damages comes down, Jones is not out of the woods. What happens next for him? So after this case wraps, he'll be headed to Connecticut for the trial up there. That one's going to be really rough on him. I think that this is kind of a warm-up act, honestly, because this is only one case, if it's not seven. It's in Texas, which is stingy, as opposed to in Connecticut, where they have different attitudes

around jury verdicts. And it's in the community where this happened. I mean, if you had to pick a place that you had to have this case happen, Connecticut would be absolute last on your list. You don't want to be 10 miles from Sandy Hook, where everyone in that community has been affected when you're hearing a damages case against the guy who said it never happened. And then after that, we'll be back in Texas. There'll be a second Sandy Hook trial here, I believe in October. And then finally, there's another client who Jones' show misidentified as the shooter

in the Parkland shooting in 2018. Just posted a picture of this guy that they got off of 4chan and said, oh, this is the Parkland shooter and it wasn't him. And that guy sued them and also had a default judgment. And so that case will be the final one. And then we'll see what happens. Dan, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. That's all for today.

FrontBurner was produced this week by Imogen Burchard, Derek Vanderwyk, Simi Bassey, Ali Janes, and Ashley Fraser. Our intern is Rukhsar Ali. Our side design was by Matt Cameron and Sam McNulty. Our music is by Joseph Schabison. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos. I'm Jonathan Mopizzi, in it for Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.