Parents of some of the children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 have launched a defamation lawsuit against prolific conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, host of the Infowars website.
For a number of years now, in the wake of high profile shootings comes the inevitable flurry of conspiracy theories, most of which assert the shootings have been staged, and those who survived and the families of those who died are all “crisis actors”, employed by the government to play roles, much the same way an actor plays a role in a TV programme or movie.
Such conspiracy theories followed tragedies such as the Las Vegas concert shooting, the Aurora cinema shooting and the recent shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and at YouTube headquarters.
While there are a number of conspiracy theorists flouting such “false flag” stories on the Internet, arguably none have the influence of Alex Jones. His Infowars website boasts a Facebook audience of almost a million followers and his website gets millions of monthly views. And since the Sandy Hook shooting happened in 2012, Alex Jones has continually repeated suggestions that the parents of the children killed in the tragedy are all actors.
And now some of the parents have had enough.
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Leonard Pozner, Veronique De La Rosa and Neil Heslin have launched lawsuits against Alex Jones and Infowars for his repeated accusations and insinuations that they are all crisis actors and that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a staged operation by the government.
“Even after these folks had to experience this trauma, for the next five years they were tormented by Alex Jones with vicious lies about them” Mark Bankston, the lawyer handling the cases for the parents, told HuffPost. The parents are seeking at least $1 million in damages.
Those involved with the tragedy at Sandy Hook have had to deal with harassment and death threats from conspiracy theorists on the Internet, and it is perhaps inevitable that at least some of those people are regular followers of Alex Jones’ conspiracy-driven media channels.
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Alex Jones is also the defendant in at least two other cases of defamation, including one case where he had incorrectly identified the shooter at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
And in 2017 a woman was sentenced to 5 months in prison for sending one of the parents of Sandy Hook continued death threats through voicemail and email.
Freedom of speech is not a free ticket to say whatever you want without consequence. And it appears online conspiracy theorists are learning that reality with an increasing frequency of late.