{"id":628,"date":"2022-08-26T20:00:54","date_gmt":"2022-08-26T20:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/?p=628"},"modified":"2022-08-26T21:49:01","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T21:49:01","slug":"a-monumental-victory-for-sandy-hook-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/a-monumental-victory-for-sandy-hook-parents\/","title":{"rendered":"A Monumental Victory for Sandy Hook Parents"},"content":{"rendered":"An Austin jury has ordered conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones to pay more than $45 million in punitive damages to the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting for spreading the lie that the parents had helped stage the massacre.\r\n<h4><strong>The case has been described as one of the most important defamation lawsuits in a generation, while the Kaster, Lynch, Farrar &amp; Ball team\u2019s courtroom performance will be studied for years to come.<\/strong><\/h4>\r\n<a href=\"https:\/\/people.com\/crime\/parents-of-sandy-hook-victim-seek-150-million-in-damages-from-alex-jones\/\">People Magazine<\/a>: <em data-rich-text-format-boundary=\"true\">The far-right personality was found liable for spreading baseless and inflammatory statements about the massacre, calling the mass shooting &#8220;a giant hoax. At the time, Jones told the millions who watch his show and visit his site that it was a &#8220;false flag&#8221; operation staged by crisis actors posing as grieving parents to strengthen gun control laws.<\/em>\r\n<h4>Perry Mason Moment<\/h4>\r\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tpnSCIak5A8\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe>\r\n\r\nNational news accounts described a withering attack by lead trial lawyer Mark Bankston that caught Jones in his deceptions and attempts to hide evidence. A cross-examination of Jones culminated in what Jones himself described as a \u201cPerry Mason moment\u201d in which Bankston impeached Jones with text messages inadvertently supplied by his own defense lawyers.\u00a0\u00a0The dramatic exchange made national news.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/08\/03\/us\/politics\/alex-jones-trial-sandy-hook.html?name=styln-sandy-hook&amp;region=TOP_BANNER&amp;block=storyline_menu_recirc&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Article&amp;variant=show&amp;is_new=false\" data-rich-text-format-boundary=\"true\">New York Times<\/a>:\r\n\r\n<em>\u201cMr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message you\u2019ve sent for the past two years?\u201d the parents\u2019 lawyer, Mark Bankston, asked Mr. Jones. The text messages were significant because Mr. Jones had claimed for years that he had searched his phone for texts about the Sandy Hook cases and found none. \u201cYou know what perjury is, right?\u201d Mr. Bankston asked Mr. Jones, who indicated that he did.<\/em>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Entertainment\/wireStory\/alex-jones-concedes-sandy-hook-attack-100-real-87902203\">ABC News<\/a>:\r\n\r\n<em>And shortly after Jones declared \u201cI don\u2019t use email,\u201d Jones was shown one that came from his address, and another one from an Infowars business officer telling Jones that the company had earned $800,000 gross in selling its products in a single day, which would amount to nearly $300 million in a year.<\/em>\r\n\r\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/youtube.com\/embed\/7VM7HgjzI9U\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe>\r\n<strong>&#8220;Above the Law&#8221; described an exchange between Infowars sidekick Owen Shroyer and Kyle Farrar:<\/strong>\r\n\r\nPlaintiffs\u2019 attorney Kyle Farrar got the ball rolling by getting Shroyer to agree that deceptively editing videos is\u00a0<em>bad<\/em>. Also airing unvetted stories and videos from random sources, because people can get hurt, and that, too, is\u00a0<em>bad.\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\n<em>Golly, wherever could this line of questioning be going?\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nSurprise! It was going to Shroyer using a deceptively edited video from some rando on the internet without doing a single moment of vetting in an apparent effort to smear Heslin and get back at Megyn Kelly.\r\n\r\nIn a spectacular act of cruelty, Shroyer took a \u201cstory\u201d from an anonymous internet source to suggest that Heslin was lying when he told Kelly he\u2019d held his dead son in his arms. Based on a snippet of video from the coroner explaining that the bodies were so riddled with machine gun fire that he\u2019d opted to allow the parents to identify their children by photograph rather than in-person, Shroyer inferred that the state had confiscated the bodies and never returned them to the parents\u00a0<em>at all<\/em>.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou would remember if you held your dead kid in your hands with a bullet hole, that\u2019s not something you forget,\u201d Shroyer said gleefully in the broadcast, played multiple times for the jury.\r\n\r\n\u201cI could have done a better job,\u201d Shroyer conceded.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou could have done\u00a0<em>a job<\/em>,\u201d Farrar shot back.\r\n\r\nWhen Shroyer protested that he was live on air when the story came to him and didn\u2019t have time to check it, Farrar pounced\r\n\r\n\u201cIs \u2018I didn\u2019t have time\u2019 an excuse for defamation?\u201d he demanded.\r\n\r\nShroyer conceded it was not.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8ssE8bXmMVo\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe>\r\n\r\n<strong>In closing arguments<\/strong>, Wes Ball asked jurors to \u201cstop the monetization of misinformation and lies.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nMr. Jones lost four defamation cases last year that were filed against him by the families of 10 victims of the shooting, which killed 20 first graders and six educators.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nMr. Jones lost those cases\r\n\r\n\r\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PEuhTtwSqCw\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Austin jury has ordered conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones to pay more than $45 million in punitive damages to the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting for spreading the lie that the parents had helped stage the massacre. The case has been described as one of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":646,"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions\/646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infowarslawsuit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}