news Alex Jones trial - ****show continues

July 31, 2022

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Alex Jones' defense attorney "messed up" and sent a digital copy of the far-right conspiracy theorist's cell phone to the lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents who have sued him for defamation, the parents' lawyer said in court on Wednesday.

The copy of Jones' phone revealed a text about the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre that Jones claimed did not exist, as well as financial information for Jones' InfoWars that Jones didn't turn over during deposition in that case.

Attorney Mark Bankston — who is representing Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of a boy killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting — announced in a Texas courtroom that Jones' lawyer sent him an "entire digital copy" of Jones' cell phone "with every text message you've sent for the past two years" twelve days ago.

Bankston said that when he "informed" Jones' lawyer about what he did, he "did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way."

"That is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn't have text messages about Sandy Hook," Bankston told Jones as Jones was on the witness stand testifying in his own defense during his defamation damages trial.

Bankston then accused Jones of lying during his deposition when he claimed he did not have messages about Sandy Hook on his phone.

"You know what perjury is, right? I just want to make sure you know before we go any further," Bankston asked Jones.

Jones testified that he didn't see the text messages mentioning Sandy Hook and that he gave everything that he could find to his lawyer.

Bankston also asked Jones about messages showing that InfoWars made as much as $800,000 per day in 2018, financial information that wasn't provided in the deposition.

After the testimony and court took a break, Jones left the courtroom with his lawyer, who later returned to court on the phone and spoke with Bankston to confirm it was a digital copy of Jones' phone.

Meanwhile, Bankston mused out loud, saying, "There's going to be months of fallout from this."

"You know what no one's thought about yet?" he asked. "What happens when that phone goes to law enforcement?"

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The first Sandy Hook defamation suit against agitprop podcaster Alex Jones is underway in Austin, Texas this week. After years of harassment by Jones’s rabid fans convinced that the shooting of their 6-year-old son Jesse and 21 others was a hoax, plaintiffs Neil Heslin and Scarlet Lewis are finally getting their day in court.

Team Jones has mounted what could generously be described as a ****show dumpster fire performance before Travis County District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble. The other day Jones’s attorney Andino Reynal actually flipped off opposing counsel Mark Bankston in the courtroom — although outside the presence of the judge and jury. And somehow yesterday was worse.

Jones’s company decided that producer Daria Karpova was the best person to represent Infowars on the witness stand. And so she spent yesterday and today unsuccessfully attempting to bob and weave around Bankston’s questions. In a truly spectacular own goal, Karpova characterized a 2017 interview Jones did with Megyn Kelly, then of NBC, as being almost entirely about the Sandy Hook shooting.

The plaintiffs were then allowed to play the entire 17-minute segment in open court, including a sizzle reel that included Jones calling victims of the 2017 suicide bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester “liberals and trendies,” opining that the videos of kids fleeing Sandy Hook “looked like a drill,” admitting that his “research” consists of pulling up articles on the internet and discussing them with his producers, and refusing to apologize for any of it.

Karpova further ingratiated herself with the jury by remarking sympathetically that it’s very stressful being Alex Jones because people tell horrible lies about him. This prompted an incredulous outburst from the plaintiffs’ lawyer, who wondered if she understood how “ironic” it was to say such a thing in the room with people whose son was murdered and who then found themselves swept up in a maelstrom of lies by a huckster who flogs supplements online.

At the conclusion of her questioning, Karpova was ushered out into the hall while the jury propounded written questions for her. In an ominous sign for the defendant, the questions were all of the “when did you stop beating your wife” variety. And yet, counselor Reynal failed to object until Karpova was back on the stand, at which point, realizing his mistake, he attempted to interrupt. Too late!

Does the Infowars staff do research? Kind of.

Was the Infowars segment “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed” literal or metaphorical? Metaphor.

Does the witness think this entire event is a staged show trial? Partially staged.

Can the witness compare Jones’s grief to the grief of the plaintiffs whose child was murdered? Alex has suffered, it’s hard to compare the two.

It was brutal. And yet Karpova was only the second worst witness of the day, because after her came Owen Shroyer. Shroyer is an Infowars host who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, called for former President Barack Obama to be lynched, and is currently charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021, an action he likens to those of Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama.

In a spectacular act of cruelty, Shroyer took a “story” from an anonymous internet source to suggest that Heslin was lying when he told Megyn Kelly he’d held his dead son in his arms.

“You would remember if you held your dead kid in your hands with a bullet hole, that’s not something you forget,” Shroyer said gleefully in the broadcast, played multiple times for the jury.

“I could have done a better job,” Shroyer conceded.

When Shroyer protested that he was live on air when the story came to him and didn’t have time to check it, Farrar pounced

“Is ‘I didn’t have time’ an excuse for defamation?”

Shroyer conceded it was not.

And like Karpova, Shroyer seemed intent on making himself as unlikable to the jury as possible, conceding that the plaintiffs must have been hurt by his broadcast, but rationalizing that the trial was probably prolonging the pain.

After Shroyer’s testimony, Judge Gamble dismissed the jury and engaged in a colloquy with the witness about his broadcasts this week. Because, although Reynal had warned the jurors during his opening statement that his client had a “medical condition” and might not be able to be present in court during the trial, in fact Jones was absenting himself from the hearing for his regularly scheduled podcast.

The judge already admonished Jones for his antics in the hall Tuesday, where he shouted at reporters that this was a “kangaroo court” and a “witch trial.” And still Shroyer and Jones both discussed the case on air for their millions of fans.

How can it possibly get worse when court resumes today? Dunno, but it’s a safe bet that it will!